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ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE
ANDEANS AND EUROPEANS AT CAJAMARCA

In 1500 c.e., the Inca empire covered most of South America’s Andean
region. That empire’s leaders first met Europeans on 15 November 1532
when a large Inca army confronted Francisco Pizarro’s band of adventurers
in the highland Andean valley of Cajamarca, Peru. At few other times in its
history would the Inca royal leadership so aggressively showcase its moral
authority and political power. Glittering and truculent, what Europeans
witnessed at Inca Cajamarca compels revised understandings of pre-contact
Inca visual art, spatial practice, and bodily expression. This book takes a
fresh look at the encounter at Cajamarca, using the episode to offer a new,
art-historical interpretation of pre-contact Inca culture and power. Adam
Herring’s study offers close readings of Inca and Andean art in a variety of
media: architecture and landscape, geoglyphs, sculpture, textiles, ceramics,
featherwork, and metalwork. The volume is richly illustrated with more
than sixty color images.

Adam Herring is Associate Professor of Art History in the Meadows School

of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. He is author of Art and Writing
in the Maya Cities, AD 600–800: A Poetics of Line (Cambridge University
Press, 2005).
ART AND VISION IN
THE INCA EMPIRE
ANDEANS AND EUROPEANS AT
CAJAMARCA

ADAM HERRING
Southern Methodist University
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107094369

C Adam Herring 2015

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2015
Printed in the United States of America
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Herring, Adam
Art and Vision in the Inca Empire / Adam Herring, Southern Methodist University.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-107-09436-9 (hardback)
1. Inca art. 2. Art and society – Andes Region – History – 16th century.
3. Art – Political aspects – Andes Region – History – 16th century.
4. Art – Psychology. 5. Cajamarca, Battle of, Peru, 1532. I. Title.
f3429.3.a7h47 2015
704.03 098323–dc23 2014048689
isbn 978-1-107-09436-9 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for
external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not
guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
CONTENTS

List of Illustrations page vii

Acknowledgments xi

INTRODUCTION 1

1 LLAMAS AND THE LOGIC OF THE GAZE 17

2 UNDER ATAWALLPA’S EYES 42

3 CHESSBOARD LANDSCAPE 79

4 QURI: A PLACE IN THE SUN 118

CONCLUSION: FOUNT OF BEAUTY 159

Notes 171
Bibliography 219
Index 247

v
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Stereoview, Keystone Company, ca. 1920: “Llamas, S. American

cousins of the Camel, Resting between Journeys, Cerro de
Pasco, Peru.” page 21
2. Route of the Pizarro expedition across the Andean region,
1531–4. 22
3. Map of the Cajamarca Valley. 23
4. View of the Cajamarca Valley. 24
5. Rendering of the Cajamarca settlement by Emiliano Harth Terré. 25
6. Inca-era rock carving from the Atacama region of northern
Chile. 27
7. Geoglyphs near Iquique, Chile. 29
8. Pair of beakers depicting birds in a cornfield, Inca (south coast),
ca. 1100–1438 c.e. 31
9. Ceremonial knife, Inca, 1450–1540 c.e. 34
10. Silver llama figurine, Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 35
11. Llama effigy (conopa), Inca, 1450–1540 c.e. 36
12. Gold armband with horse and rider with animals, Inca, sixteenth
century. 37
13. Rendering of snuff tray from the Atacama region, Tiwanaku,
100–800 c.e. 40
14. Openweave cloth, Chancay culture, c. 1400 c.e. 43
15. Cloth, Inca (?), 1450–1532 c.e. 45
16. Plan of palace complex (zone I, subzone B), Huánuco Pampa,
Peru. Inca, ca. 1450–1532. 47
17. Inca palace structures, Ecuador: “Maison de l’Inca à Callo dans le
Royaume de Quito.” 49
18. Inca palace structures, Pisaq, Peru. Ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 50
19. The inner courtyard: a spatial rendering. 50
20. Ceramic architectural effigy, Recuay, 100–800 c.e. 51
21. Feather panel (macaw feathers and cotton cloth). Wari (Corral
Redondo, Churunga Valley, Camaná Province, Peru),
ca. 750–850 c.e. 52
22. Feather panel (macaw feathers and cotton cloth). Wari (Corral
Redondo, Churunga Valley, Camaná Province), ca. 750–850 c.e. 53
23. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen
gobierno (1615/1616), 342v. 54

vii
viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

24. Woven panel, early Tiwanaku style (Titicaca region), ca. 200–400
c.e. 55
25. Carved cliff, Incamisana sector, Ollantaytambo, Peru. Inca, ca.
1450–1532 c.e. 59
26. Chinkana Grande of Saqsawaman, Peru. Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 60
27. Carved cave wall, Choquequilla, Peru. Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 61
28. Doorway and view onto Mt. Wayna Picchu, Machu Picchu,
Peru. Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 62
29. Torreón, Machu Picchu, Peru. Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 63
30. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen
gobierno (1615/1616), 79v. 65
31. Architectural relief, Cerro Sechı́n, Peru, ca. 800 b.c.e. 67
32. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen
gobierno (1615/1616), 147v. 69
33. Man’s tunic with key pattern, Inca, ca. 1450–1532. 73
34. Mural painting, La Centinela, Peru, ca. 1500 c.e. 74
35. All-t’oqapu tunic. Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 75
36. Illustration from Martı́n de Murúa, Historia general del Piru, 1616,
Ms. Ludwig XIII 16 (83.MP.159), fol. 40v. 77
37. Mirror case with a couple playing chess, 1325–1350. France,
Paris, fourteenth century. 80
38. Cover: Julie Jones, Art of Empire: The Inca of Peru (New York:
Museum of Primitive Art, 1964). 81
39. Mt. Huanacauri, Peru. 90
40. Inca andesite mountain effigy excavated from
Inkapirqa/Waminan (Ayacucho, Peru). 91
41. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen
gobierno (1615/1616), 161v. 95
42. Inca temple at summit of Mt. Huanacauri, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 96
43. Coca bag, Inca. Cotton and camelid fiber, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 97
44. Miniature palanquin with attendants, north coast of Peru,
ca. 1400 c.e. 100
45. Palanquin, Chimú. Before 1470 c.e. 101
46. “Military tunic,” Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 104
47. “Military tunic,” Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 105
48. “Military tunic,” Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 106
49. “Military tunic,” Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 107
50. Man’s tunic, Wari, 650–800 c.e. 109
51. Carved stone outcrop, Chinchero, Peru. Inca, ca. 1450–1532. 111
52. Rendering of “Front Face Deity” from the Gateway of the Sun,
Tiwanaku, Bolivia, before 1000 c.e. 113
53. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen
gobierno (1615/1616), 254v. 115
54. Plan of Inca administrative center of Pumpu ( Junı́n Province),
Peru. 123
55. A structure along the main plaza at the site of Huchuy Cuzco,
Peru. Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 124
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix

56. Inca structure (“El Cuarto de Rescate”), Cajamarca. Inca,

ca. 1460–1532 c.e. 125
57. Remains of Inca tower gate, Quispiguanca/Urubamba, Peru.
Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 126
58. Architectural miniature, Inca, ca. 1400–1532 c.e. 127
59. Martı́n de Murúa, Historia general del Piru, 1616, Ms. Ludwig XIII
16 (83.MP.159), fol. 84r. 136
60. Painted rock face, Pucará de Rinconada, Argentina. Inca,
ca. 1520 c.e. 137
61. Stepped beakers, Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 147
62. Stepped beaker, Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 147
63. Chimú (?) gold plume, coast of Peru, before ca. 1470 c.e. 148
64. Gold bangles, Chimú (?), before ca. 1470 c.e. 149
65. Tunic with gold appliqué (curi cusma), Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 149
66. Gold mummy mask, Chimú, before 1532 c.e. 151
67. Wooden drinking cup (qero), Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 151
68. Feathered bag, Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 152
69. Man’s tunic, Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. 153
70. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen
gobierno (1615/1616), 404v. 157
71. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen
gobierno (1615/1616), 318v. 168
72. Casket with scenes from romances. Paris, fourteenth century. 169
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

for their help over many years, i thank kenneth andrien, peter
Bakewell, Amy Buono, Richard Burger, Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino, R. Alan
Covey, Marco Curatola Petrocchi, Gudrun Dauner, Carolyn Dean, Derick
Dreher, Amy Freund, Christopher Gales, Regan Huff, Giles R. M. Knox,
George Lau, Dana Leibsohn, Guillermo Maafs Molina, Robert Maxwell,
Colin McEwan, Mary Miller, Walton Muyumba, Jeffrey Quilter, Daniel Slive,
Kurt Stache, Rebecca Stone, Roberto Tejada, Birgit Wendt-Stache, and Mar-
garet Young-Sánchez. Two anonymous reviewers retained by Cambridge Uni-
versity Press provided valuable insight and commentary on the manuscript. All
errors of fact or scholarly argument are my own.
For their assistance in assembling the images in this volume, I am grateful to
Adrianna Stephenson of the Visual Resources Library of the Department of
Art History at Southern Methodist University, and Joseph Hartman, Mariana
von Hartenthal, Alice Heeren-Sabato, Elena Gittelman, and Rheagan Mar-
tin, all of the Department of Art History at Southern Methodist University.
For her time and effort on my behalf I am particularly grateful to Chelsea
Dacus of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. For their generous permission to
reproduce visual images from their publications, I thank Augustı́n Llagostera,
Colin McEwan and Frank Meddens, Michael Moseley, Eduardo Peláez, Flora
Vilches and Enrique Uribe, and Dwight Wallace. I also thank Mr. Bernard
Selz of New York City.
Portions of this study were presented to attentive audiences at the Depart-
ment of Art History of the University of Chicago; the Seminario de Estudios
Andinos, Pontı́fica Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima; the Andean Archae-
ology Seminar of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London;
the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz/University of Tokyo; and the Scratch-
pad Series of the Department of Art History, Southern Methodist University,
Dallas.
I thank Pamela Patton, who as chair of the Department of Art History pro-
vided generous support for my research; I also thank the University Research
Council and the Faculty Development Fund of the Meadows School of the

xi
xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Arts, Southern Methodist University. I wish also to acknowledge the life-

long generosity of Clarence and Maret Herring, William D. Duthie, David
and Eudora Bischoff, and Fredrick and Diana Herring. This work could
not have been written without Annie Herring and Alexis McCrossen, ever
bright-shining.
INTRODUCTION

In 1500 c.e. the Inca empire covered most of South America’s Andean region –
nearly all of coastal and highland Peru, as well as large portions of Ecuador,
Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. That empire’s leaders first met Europeans on
15 November 1532, when a large Inca army confronted Francisco Pizarro’s
band of 168 soldiers at Cajamarca, Peru. There in the harsh daylight of the
highland Andes, the Inca royal court was in the fullness of its powers, while the
impulses of European expansionism were ascendant. At few other moments in
its history would the Inca royal leadership so aggressively expound its claims
to moral authority and political power. At no other point would European
observers be as attentive to that cultural expression, or so assiduous in com-
mitting their impressions to writing. Vision at Inca Cajamarca takes a fresh look
at the encounter at Cajamarca, using that episode to offer a new art-historical
interpretation of Inca culture and power.
A day after their arrival at Cajamarca, Pizarro and his men ambushed and
massacred the royal Inca entourage on the Inca settlement’s central plaza. Not
surprisingly, this action figures prominently in both triumphal and revisionist
histories of the Americas. It is framed alternately as a defining chapter in the
advent of the modern European mentalité, or the bloody induction of a native
Andean society into the West’s incipient global hegemony.1 Either way, the
meeting ushers the Inca into the grand narrative of the West: Cajamarca’s events
consign the pre-contact Inca cultural order to an irrecuperable, prelapsarian
past. The Incas’ heirs were now left to negotiate the myriad disenchantments
of emergent global modernity. Such may be the case, though those narratives
continue to push aside alternative accounts of power and cultural experience
at Inca Cajamarca.
In examining the problem of vision at Inca Cajamarca, I hope to bring for-
ward part of that other history. My analysis takes up five episodes of visual expe-
rience that took place over those twenty-four hours at Cajamarca: a sudden
prospect onto animals grazing in a distant valley; the haze of a semitransparent
cloth; the patterned resplendence of an oncoming army; sunlight off yellow
metal; and the glint of a stray human hair. Pizarro’s men reported all these as so
many anecdotal asides, each one irreducible in its singularity. And so historians
have since understood them: reduced to historical marginalia, these eccentric
1
2 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

details do not question or displace a narrative driven by European cultural

trajectories, modes of signification, and aesthetic criteria. In the present study
I consider them as more consequential forms of cultural expression and expe-
rience. Restored to inquiry, these spectatorial encounters vest the episode
at Cajamarca with new historical and ethical dimensions. They also com-
pel revised understandings of pre-contact Inca visual art, spatial practice, and
bodily expression.
At Cajamarca, the Inca royal leadership confronted foreign enemies and
technologies. They responded with their own array of technical aptitudes and
social disciplines. Those native Andean technologies of power were many –
and they invite further inquiry, whether the logistics of camelid pastoralism or
the ballistics of Andean sling-stones. Prominent among them, and the guiding
interest of this study, was a regime of perception, a coordination of bodily
experience with the symbolic structures of myth and cosmology.2 That order
of culture was based on the sensory functions and cognitive mechanisms of the
human organism. As a “regime” it was also a cultural construct, a politicized,
complexly situational inflection of human perceptual faculties. The vision
cited in this study’s title thus gestures to a biological capacity of the human
body, and to a cultural negotiation of ideology and power. Among the Inca
leadership, seeing was cultural being: the sensory, moral, and social capacities
of vision were staged across landscapes, in the confines of architectural spaces,
and in performative tableaux of mass action.
This is to say that the Incas’ actions at Cajamarca were not just visible to non-
Inca observers: they were visually discursive. The Inca systematically enacted
society and culture as visible fact, such that sight itself operated a means of
argument and analytical reasoning. The Inca leadership’s supremacy – military,
political, mythic – was constituted as a set of visible encounters. In those
bodily perceptions the Inca made their cultural system not just sensible, but
incontrovertible.

the spanish arrived at cajamarca late on a friday afternoon.

Francisco Pizarro’s band had marched from the Pacific over the previous
weeks, moving through coastal deserts and bitterly cold mountain passes.3
They arrived at Cajamarca cold and wet. The scale and monumentality of
the Inca settlement immediately impressed them, though they found the place
nearly deserted. The Spanish seized and interrogated a lesser Inca official who
came forward to meet them. The man informed the Spanish that a large Inca
army was camped on the opposite side of the Cajamarca valley. In its midst,
the Spanish were told, was the Inca monarch himself, lodged with his retinue
at a complex of stone buildings near a prominent spur of rock (peñol). The
INTRODUCTION 3

native king would be known to the Europeans as Atabaliba, or Atabalipa – and

among specialists today as Atawallpa.
Pizarro and his soldiers regarded the Inca encampment. “For a league [five
kilometers] around that building the fields were everywhere covered with
white tents.”4 The Europeans estimated the Inca army’s size to be at least
40,000; some accounts reported double that number. Two decades later, the
Inca nobles of Cuzco recalled that it numbered around 87,000 fighting men,
along with 30,000 male camp attendants – this not including wives and female
servants, who probably numbered in the tens of thousands.5 The Inca camp
was made up of well over 100,000 people, as well as tens of thousands of pack
animals. The Inca encampment outside of town was less an army than a fully
constituted society unto itself: populous, organized, provisioned, governed.
Pizarro quickly sent ahead a party of horsemen to meet the native ruler. The
bold move would show Spanish fearlessness – to their Andean antagonists, and
to the European party itself, now badly outnumbered. The Spanish embassy
also served another, more important purpose. The soldiers were to convince
the Inca ruler to descend into town to meet with the Spanish captain. It was
a ploy, of course, a stratagem employed for decades by European slavers and
bush fighters in the Americas. Pizarro sought to lure Atawallpa into close
quarters, then capture or kill him outright with a surprise attack. At a stroke,
the Inca leadership would be decapitated: the small Spanish force would seize
the initiative, and the Incas’ vast armies would be left paralyzed, perhaps for
weeks. Central Cajamarca was perfectly suited to the Spanish ruse: its confined
spaces would restrict the Incas’ ability to react and maneuver, and so render
them doubly vulnerable to ambush.
About twenty soldiers made the trip to the palace east of town. Pizarro’s
emissaries took their measure of the Inca army camped there, before being
admitted into the Inca palace. The riders were made to wait for some hours
in the outer courtyards of the Inca complex. After this delay the Spanish were
allowed to pass deeper into the structure, where they were led into the presence
of the Inca ruler. They met with Atawallpa, and then they were allowed to
return to central Cajamarca unharmed.
Whatever communication took place between the Inca king and the Spanish
horsemen, the Inca ruler made the trip to Cajamarca’s main plaza late the
next afternoon. Borne on an elaborate palanquin, he entered the plaza with
many thousands of guards and attendants – a retinue of as many as 6,000.
The Spanish engaged in a scripted legal parley – the requerimiento.6 By it, the
native ruler was invited to submit to Spanish legal and religious authority.
Predictably, the Inca king was impassive. The Europeans summarily deemed
the offer rejected. Pizarro’s men then attacked by surprise. Cannon were
touched off, horsemen surged forward. An ugly scrum took place on the plaza
4 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

as Atawallpa’s guards fought off the Europeans’ attempt to pull the Inca ruler
from his sedan chair. The Inca lost that struggle, and Atawallpa was seized alive.
The wider fight gave way to a massacre. Atawallpa’s entire retinue, some five
or six thousand men and women, died on Cajamarca’s plaza. Some members
of the Inca entourage managed to elude the slaughter. Fleeing through the
fields outside the settlement, they were chased down and killed by Pizarro’s
horsemen.
The Spanish would hold Atawallpa hostage for nine months, during which
time the Spanish demanded a large ransom in precious metal. After many
months of tension, the Inca delivered the stipulated amount of metal. At that
point the Inca ruler was executed on pretext: Atawallpa was garroted on 26 July
1533. Pizarro’s force left Cajamarca on 11 August 1533, moving along the high-
land Inca road that led south to the Inca capital of Cuzco. After several battles
with Inca armies, Pizarro’s force would capture the Inca capital about three
months later, on 15 November 1533. The Incas’ ancestral capital was looted.
Pizarro would refound Cuzco as a royal Spanish town on 23 March 1534.
Cuzco’s finest properties – its palaces, residence compounds, and temples –
were repartitioned among Pizarro’s soldiers. Inca generals made concerted
attempts to retake the city over a year of bitter fighting in and around Cuzco
in 1536/7.7 The city was severely damaged, though it did not fall back into
the Inca leadership’s hands. After that, the campaign entered a decades-long
strategic phase that is widely underacknowledged by Western historians. In the
southern highlands, Inca leaders pulled back into mountainous country and
there retrenched; in the far north, Inca generals actively fought on, extract-
ing a heavy toll from the Spanish and their native allies. The last Inca ruler
capitulated to the Spanish viceregal administration only in 1572, by which
time Inca nobility’s political loyalties were complexly divided between the
Inca and Habsburg dynasties. Throughout those decades, the ancestral capital
of Inca dynastic authority never returned to the control of the independent
Inca leadership.

the broad historical outlines of the meeting at cajamarca are well

known to history, though the episode’s particulars are less well understood
than generally acknowledged. Those details significantly reshape the narrative
of the encounter: they lend this study its overall structure.
The four main chapters of my analysis move chronologically through the
events of 15–16 November. They begin with the Europeans’ arrival in the
Cajamarca valley late in the afternoon of Friday 15 November (Chapter 1).
Chapter 2 addresses the Spanish embassy to the Inca camp outside Caja-
marca that same day. Chapters 3 and 4 treat the Incas’ approach and entry to
Cajamarca’s central precincts the following day, 16 November. A concluding
INTRODUCTION 5

chapter returns to Atawallpa’s chambers on the afternoon before the Incas’

defeat; there I offer final thoughts on Inca art and bodily experience. In the
aggregate, the study reexamines the historical narrative of 15–16 November
1532; with it I hope to recuperate the sensory dimensions of Inca authority
and political prestige.
Chapter 1, “Llamas and the Logic of the Gaze,” takes up the Europeans’ first
impression of Cajamarca from the northern rim of the valley. “There we were
given to find many pastors and llamas,” commented Cristóbal de Mena (y halla-
mos muchos pastores y carneros). Mena and his companions brought with them so
many naturalized cultural conventions of landscape and power. At Cajamarca
they confronted an altogether alien landscape: a valley overrun by llamas. Those
animals were not part of the Andes’ natural environment. Ecologically intru-
sive, economically disruptive, and menacingly aggressive, Cajamarca’s llamas
were creatures of empire and instruments of cultural power. Offering a close
look at Inca camelid pastoralism, Chapter 1 introduces landscape and the logic
of the gaze at Inca Cajamarca.
Chapter 2, “Under Atawallpa’s Eyes,” examines the first meeting between
Pizarro’s men and the Inca leadership at the architectural complex outside
Cajamarca later on the afternoon of 15 November. When the Europeans first
saw the Inca ruler, they found him seated in a small courtyard among his
retainers. “No one could see him directly,” wrote one Spanish soldier later,
“for he was completely obscured by a thin veil held up before him by two
women.” In Chapter 2 I consider the role of eyesight within Inca discourses
of moral authority and political prestige. My analysis examines the veil as
architectural element, as theatrical act, and as means of cultural production. At
once seen and seen through, the raised cloth serves to introduce the cultural
construction of sight among the Inca leadership. Chapter 2 brings forward the
cultivated visualism of Inca courtly life.
On the day after the Europeans’ arrival in Cajamarca, the Inca ruler and his
entourage traversed the distance between their camp and town. “They wore
costumes like chessboards,” wrote several Spanish soldiers.8 “So they began
to march, blanketing the fields,” wrote another.9 Chapter 3, “Chessboard
Landscape,” considers the Incas’ march to Cajamarca. That forward advance,
I argue, paraded both the Inca leadership’s fighting strength and its ideological
assumptions. That movement demonstrated the Incas’ military order and dis-
cipline – the native army’s will to close with the enemy, and their resolve to
fight hard once in striking distance. The royal Inca retinue’s progress toward
Cajamarca also offers a lesson in visual expression and the performative con-
struction of space, temporality, and military power. As their enemies watched,
the Inca sign-system – a body of cultural truth and a way of knowing – was
enacted. Chapter 3 offers an analysis of Inca design patterns in motion and in
the political moment.
6 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

The Inca ruler and his retinue entered Cajamarca in a blast of noise and
reflected light: rreluzia con el sol, wrote one Spanish observer, “how all their gold
gleamed in the sunlight.” I examine the Incas’ sensory energy in Chapter 4,
“Quri: A Place in the Sun.” My analysis interprets the Inca entry into Caja-
marca as an elaborate ceremony of possession: Atawallpa and his entourage
processed into the town’s central plaza, and there went about the rituals of
patronal authority and communal obeisance. The entry was a rite of sensory
intensification, a staged performance of shining costumes and regalia, song and
drumming. Glittering, loud, and kinesthetic, the entry generated the violently
sensible energies of Inca sacral authority. Disorienting and alluring to Andean
observers as well as European eyes, quri, “gold,” was a defining signature of
that triumphalism. My discussion explores the cultural phenomenology of
light, color, and optical brilliance among the Inca leadership, bringing forward
the performative and synesthetic dimensions of Inca metalwork. Chapter 4
engages the sensory materialism of Inca cultural experience.
The Inca ate Atawallpa’s hair: while in Atawallpa’s presence, Pizarro’s men
saw female attendants eat stray hairs they plucked off the Inca ruler’s cloth-
ing. “Fount of Beauty” closes the study with a brief consideration of Inca
materiality, memory, and embodied experience.

the people who met the europeans at cajamarca are difficult to

reckon as historical actors. The Incas’ ethnic origins, sociological makeup, and
political emergence all remain imperfectly understood. From the sixteenth
century onward, native Andeans as well as European settlers, evangelizers, and
administrators produced a rich corpus of writings on the pre-contact Inca
past. Those reports and accounts may be discursively rich, but they are hardly
the stuff of Rankean historical empiricism. In the aggregate they offer a nar-
rative of divine (or politically deceptive) foundation, rapid rise, and, finally,
teetering political instability, all of it unfolding over a span of perhaps a century.
Recent archaeological work and historical interpretation offer a more plausible
story than this. It is now clear that the Inca emerged in the highland Andean
region of Cuzco, Peru, in the thirteenth century c.e.10 They were a people
of complex polyglot origins: the Inca leadership appear to have spoken some
combination of the Quechua, Aymara, and Puquina languages. The Inca were
just one of many groups active in the central Andes after the decline of the Wari
empire around 1000 c.e. They went on to dominate Andean South America
by about 1500, folding the Andes’ diverse lands and ethnicities into a closely
administered imperial order.
Scholars now recognize the Inca leader who met the Europeans at Cajamarca
as Atawallpa, “Favored in Battle,” or “The Victory-Destined.” (Sixteenth-
and seventeeth-century Quechua speakers also identified the name as gallo,
INTRODUCTION 7

“fighting cock.”11 ) To his subordinates he was Sapa Inka, “the one-and-only,”

or “peerless leader,” or more directly from the Incas’ Aymara- and Puquina-
inflected Quechua language, “the pure-Inca” or “most-Inka Inca.”12 Atawallpa
thus shared the defining identity of the broad Inca leadership under him; but
he was the essence of the Inca state, its very pith. He was the Inca, El Ynga, as
the Spanish would colloquially – and in fact properly – refer to him.
Atawallpa was no stranger to the northern highlands. He was Ecuadorian
by birth, a product of the Inca expansion into Ecuador in the decades after
1450. Atawallpa had come to power after the death of his father, the previous
Inca ruler Wayna Qhapaq. Both strident militarist and strong administrator,
that king had been among the Incas’ most successful monarchs. A succes-
sion conflict followed Wayna Qhapaq’s death in the mid-1520s. A northern,
Ecuadorian dynastic faction was pitted against another from Cuzco, the tra-
ditional center of Inca governance in the southern highlands. Atawallpa was
the representative of the northern party; a half-brother, Waskhar, protagonized
the Cuzco faction. Much of this civil war among the Inca leadership appears
to have played out as a bloodless political contest. Both sides sought to enlist
allies among the Inca nobility and regional client-leaderships across the Inca
realm. The conflict seems to have lasted several years, escalating to outright
warfare between large armies. Atawallpa and his advisors prevailed, ensuring
their success with a military victory in the southern Peruvian valley of Abancay
in early 1532.13
Pretender, rival, usurper: Atawallpa was all three before he became king.
And king he may never have been in the strictest sense. Indeed, the case has
long been made that Atwallpa was an illegitimate ruler. He had no right to
the Inca kingship, this argument goes, nor had he undergone the ceremonies
of accession by which that power was ceremonially invested. So claimed large
portions of the Inca leadership in the colonial era. Those nobles had long-
standing grievance with Atawallpa and his faction, having numbered among
his opponents in the war of dynastic succession. Francisco Pizarro and his
political allies also contended that Atawallpa was not the Incas’ true king.14
Their arguments are to be trusted even less. Francisco Pizarro had given the
order to execute Atawallpa in July 1533, a move that even in the event appeared
to many as hasty and altogether unprovoked. Pizarro’s apologists were eager
to cast Atawallpa as a usurper. Were Atawallpa not the rightful Inca monarch,
Pizarro and his men would be absolved of regicide in the eyes of Spanish law;
moreover, their peremptory act of execution would be recast as the delivery
of justice.15
It is the case that Atawallpa gained the title of Sapa Inka only through
prolonged factional conflict. It is also true that he had not been invested with
the office of kingship in a ceremony in Cuzco. Even so, there is no evidence
that such a succession crisis was out of the norm for the Inca high leadership.
8 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

Factional struggle among royal pretenders brought short-term upheaval, but it

also forced the kind of consensus and compromise on the wider Inca leadership
that might not otherwise be accomplished. The contest for power also tended
to favor the most aggressive party. That kind of aggression was admired in seated
Inca kings: ferocity was all but required of the leader of the Incas’ militarized,
expansionist state. Further, such admiration was reaffirmed in dynastic lore.
Pachakuti Inka Yupanki, remembered by the Inca as their greatest commander
and administrator, assumed power during a military crisis; born a lesser son,
Pachakuti seized power from both the seated ruler and more likely dynastic
successors to assume the kingship.16 Atawallpa may not have been considered
the legitimate Inca ruler by his rivals and enemies. Among his generals and
retainers at Cajamarca, however, he was the Incas’ rightful monarch, and so
he is considered in the present analysis.
In important respects the biography of the Inca ruler is secondary to this
study’s analysis. This is not a study of “the behavior of Atahualpa” in the mode
of traditional political or diplomatic history: my argument does not attempt
historical biography, nor a study in comparative leadership, nor any considera-
tion of the relative qualities of pre-contact Andean and early modern European
mentalities.17 My analysis seeks to frame the episode at Cajamarca less as a con-
test between leaders – Francisco Pizarro and Atawallpa – than as a historically
situated encounter between two distinct social and cultural organizations. This
does not deny the Inca cultural agency; it rather seeks to recast their actions in
terms of cultural institutions, rather than individual subjectivities.
Throughout the study I employ the phrase “the Inca leadership.” My use
of the phrase corresponds roughly to what cultural anthropologists describe as
“political society”: that is, it gestures to a more or less cohesive subcategory of
Inca society characterized by elevated social status and mythologically endowed
authority.18 But who, exactly, constituted “the Inca leadership”? That question
is not easily answered. It included Atawallpa’s inner circle of courtiers and
retainers, certainly, as well as advisors, religious specialists and custodians,
administrators, and military men. They were drawn from Atawallpa’s royal kin-
group, or panaqa, and they likely included many close blood relatives. Beyond
Atawallpa’s immediate retinue, the Inca leadership was constituted by leaders
drawn from the Incas’ traditional heartland in the Huatanay River Valley of the
southern Peruvian highlands.19 By the time of the Spanish invasion, Inca ethnic
identity was not so easily tied to geographic origin: Atawallpa himself, very
much an ethnic Inca, was born and raised 1,500 kilometers north of Cuzco, in
an Inca-dominated province of Ecuador. Even as the social institutions of the
Inca leadership took traditional ethnic Inca far afield, so too did they remake
members of the Andes’ non-Inca ethnicities into “Incas.”
The Quechua word Inka was less an ethnic identity than a term of dynas-
tic affiliation and political hegemony. Inka, “leader” or “noble,” indicated
INTRODUCTION 9

an ancestral tradition of ruling authority that was traced back to the mythic
founder Manqo Qhapaq. In the ethnic heartland around Cuzco, friendly lead-
ers of neighboring peoples were inducted into the Inca ruling hierarchy as
“Incas-by-privilege.” As the Incas’ realm expanded, its leadership came to
include nobles drawn from the Andes’ various regional ethnicities. Inca polit-
ical organization actively sought to bind provincial nobles to the higher Inca
administrative apparatus. The Inca’s far-flung clients submitted to and in turn
replicated what one scholar of the Inca empire’s provincial elites character-
ized as “the [Inca] state’s largesse and civilizing influence, the teaching of Inca
cults, and the establishment of idealized political structures in the likeness of
Cuzco.”20
The word Inka itself was the most junior rank in a flight of male titles
that denoted relative degrees of prestige: inka (“ruler”), pawllu (“second”), and
qhapaq (“royal”).21 It was thus the lowest common denominator among the
“Inca” leadership, something like a privileged status rather than a degree of
rank. The ruler’s title, Sapa Inka, at once recognized this commonality among
Cuzco’s leadership and superseded its ascending degrees of rank: Sapa Inka,
“unique,” or “peerless ruler,” or better, “Among all the Inca, first.”22 Inca,
then, may be considered to refer to “a signifying system,” that is, to a cultural
order “through which necessarily (although not exclusively) a social order is
communicated, reproduced, experienced, and explored.”23

if the art and culture of the inca leadership are the subject of this
inquiry, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European historical accounts are
its backbone. The Pizarro expedition was manned by ambitious provin-
cials, men who were resilient on campaign and, in time, also dogged litigants.
They were not Renaissance figures of erudition and deep insight. Instead, they
were men drawn from Europe’s outlying regions – the dusty Castilian province
of Estremadura, most of them, though also a few from such places as Crete
and England.24 They are called soldiers in this account – and in the field,
soldiers they were – though they were of diverse social origins and professions.
In joining Pizarro’s risky, violent endeavor, they were intent on winning social
privilege. In writing of their experiences, they were equally determined to
protect the gains they had won. These men were knowing inhabitants – aspir-
ing protagonists – of Spain’s new administrative culture of writing and literacy.
Many could themselves write, though hardly with eloquence; the illiterates
employed professional notaries. Sharpened self-interest and sufficient techni-
cal competency among Pizarro’s men combined to produce an unusually deep
body of written reportage and commentary.
Seven members of Francisco Pizarro’s company produced reports of the
experiences at Cajamarca.25 Those accounts were rough-hewn and maladroit,
10 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

all awkward diction and quarrelsome self-assertion. They participate in what

Carlo Ginzburg has described as early modern Europe’s “different culture” of
literary production – the miller’s sermons, witches’ confessions, and thieves’
argot against which so much humanist writing of the period would define
itself.26 It is no surprise then that from the 1550s onward, Peninsular humanists
would write the soldiers’ notices out of their finely spun histories of the New
World.27 The campaigners’ clumsy reportage was deemed irrelevant to the
grand literary project of European self-reckoning.
The soldiers’ narratives do not offer “eye-witness testimony,” nor do they
“chronicle” the Peruvian campaign’s events.28 They cannot claim the histor-
ical authority such labels would bestow. The reports of Pizarro’s soldiers are
complicated documents – determined by the vagaries of memory and desire,
and no small degree of polemical inflection. Produced over a span of forty
years, they were written in very different circumstances, by men with very
different motives. Some were set down soon after the events they describe:
Cristóbal de Mena’s sensationalized narrative circulated through Europe in
several printed editions after 1534. The contemporary account of the notary
Francisco de Xerez sought to emphasize the legal diligence of his employer
Francisco Pizarro. A decade later, the soldier Juan Ruiz de Arce propounded
the rectitude of his conduct in the Peruvian campaign; Ruiz never intended his
account to be read by any but his descendants. Other reports were produced
decades later, well after political struggles between and among Pizarro’s soldiers
and crown officials had been settled: Pedro Pizarro and Diego de Trujillo set
down their accounts in the early 1570s, by which time they were old men
settled into comfortable lives on the edges of the Habsburg empire.
There can be no doubt that all these accounts are unusual and in many ways
suspect objects of historiographic rehabilitation. They present sharply distinct
versions of the Peruvian campaign, so as to confront the reader with significant
discrepancies of fact, timing, and responsibility. Real issues hang in the balance:
was the massacre on Cajamarca’s plaza triggered by Inca aggression or European
deceitfulness? Was Atawallpa’s execution a year later legally sanctioned? Was
it morally justified? Those are questions that administrators and theologians
grappled with in the sixteenth century; they remain unresolved to the present
day. Any answers significantly shape the master narrative of European expansion
into the New World and substantially affect more fine-grained assessment
of sixteenth-century Habsburg politics. It is little wonder that the soldiers’
accounts have been treated with suspicion, for they cannot be trusted to
provide answers to the broad historical questions they themselves raise.
Those are problems for other scholars and other arenas of historical inquiry.
The history told here is ostensibly smaller and more immediate in scope.
It is a story built from signal turns of phrase and the telling non sequitur.
Such is the nature of experience and recollection, and such is the nature of the
INTRODUCTION 11

Europeans’ incomprehension before the alien cultural practices they witnessed.

My inquiry thus looks for consistency and corroboration across the soldiers’
disparate narratives, though it reads those accounts precisely for their narra-
tive eccentricities and arbitrary moments of close observation. Those curious
incidentals and discursive textures point to another, less familiar order of state
and cosmos, that of the Inca leadership.
Historian James Lockhart offered a frank description of one soldier’s account:
“untutored . . . and direct, magnificently unconcerned with larger issues, and
able to see and depict what [he] experienced in vivid anecdotal fashion.”29
This characterization is apt, although the soldiers’ narratives are as noteworthy
for the uncertainties they profess as the facts they report. Pizarro’s campaigners
agonized over what they saw at Cajamarca, and how deeply these percep-
tions challenged understanding. Over and again, the accounts own up to their
authors’ limitations as observers: “he was completely obscured,” “we could not
see,” “what a strange thing it was.” Without doubt, these professions of per-
ceptual frustration had some basis in early modern rhetorical conceit. In some
measure they ventriloquize the lover’s stammer of contemporary lyric poetry,
and the renunciatory ideal of vernacular devotional literature. It would be
equally easy to consider these passages as symptomatic of the emergent colo-
nial system: we might read into them, that is, the narrative of the colonial
gaze in the New World. Even so, little is achieved in such appeals to the
specularity of literary artifice or to the recursiveness of colonial semiosis. For
to the Incas’ European witnesses, those instances of troubled vision and frank
incomprehension were not just artful codes of period response or symptoms
of the Hegelian narrative of modernity. They were facts on the ground, and as
such they were as real-seeming as any other event, physical feature, or emotion
these observers would experience in the Peruvian campaign. That alterity of
sight and mind was itself a structure of Inca power. It remains among the least
explored aspects of pre-contact Inca cultural practice.

the study’s analysis is stayed by a number of methodological and

interpretative guy wires, of which specialized readers are owed some explana-
tion. That audience is alerted already to the tension of “Inca visuality” versus
the “regime of perception.” The problem of Andean visual experience was
emplaced in contemporary Inca studies by museum exhibitions in the era of
high modernism, and the powerful, if also powerfully distortive, formalism
advocated in that scholarship.30 Vision returned in the 1990s in path-breaking
research on the Inca body, and on Andean religion.31 That scholarship has
helped to reinstate scholarly attentiveness to the centrality of visual expe-
rience in native Andean cultural practice.32 Even so, the cultural-historical
scholarship of the 1990s used its insights to pursue thesis-driven arguments
12 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

concerning Western cultural narratives: the rise of non-figuration in art; the

West’s mind/body problem; the late-antique underpinnings of piety in early
modern Peru.
Such interpretative redirection is understandable, given the richness of West-
ern cultural narratives those arguments address, as well as the semantic auster-
ity of Inca visual expression itself. The pre-contact Inca produced no written
records, few visual images, and spare, starkly enigmatic visual iconography.
Unlettered and largely aniconic, Inca visual expression eschewed the princi-
pal artistic devices by which the West judges agency and ambition in visual
expression. The philosophe Alexander von Humboldt wrote in 1812: “I saw
nothing . . . [of ] grandeur and majesty [Inca] architecture . . . it is merely inter-
esting, though highly so, in that it throws great light on the history of the
primitive civilization of the inhabitants of the mountains of the continent.”
At mid-twentieth century the Inca visual tradition seemed only to confirm
the dystopian orientalism of Kipling, Spengler, and Wittfogel. At best, the
art offered a sociological object lesson, a deep-historical foreshadowing of
twentieth-century totalitarianism, “bleak and monotonous,” in historian Louis
Boudin’s words.33
For at least fifty years specialist scholarship has consigned pre-contact Inca
visual work to two alternatives. There is the black square of Andean abstrac-
tion: the immediacy and finality of the individual object, its solipsism as visual
expression. By this logic, Inca artworks constitute self-contained “expressive
realities” that float free from society and history.34 Then there is the black
box of the archaic state: artwork (indeed, all work) as social document – “the
concretization of history,”35 and “the materialization of state power.”36 So
considered, Inca artworks are mere conveyances for the ulterior, driving truths
of society and culture. The two arguments are skeptical of each other’s claims,
being divided against each other despite mutual – and abiding – interest in the
works as cultural artifacts. Even so, they are complexly interrelated. Both are
constituted by Enlightenment criteria of aesthetic judgment (monumentalism,
high arts, noble media). They share theoretical indebtedness to Modernist
utopianism, such as it may be comprehended in universalized structures of for-
mal expression (art history) or social complexity (archaeology). They are alike
as abstract ideological constructions – each a totalizing, timeless intellectual
formalism.
So it comes as no surprise that recent art-historical scholarship on the Inca
sidesteps all-encompassing aesthetic narratives and philosophical antagonisms.
This research instead favors questions of patronage and production technique.
Even so, specialists in Andean art and archaeology acknowledge only a “dec-
orative effect” in Inca buildings, or point to the visual work of other Andean
civilizations as “arguably more interesting . . . than the abstract geometrical arts
INTRODUCTION 13

of the Incas.”37 Other specialists warn – understandably – of the “deceptions

of visibility” in Inca visual works entirely.38
Such responses in the literature of Andean studies rightly point out the deep
record of misreading in the historiography of Inca art and architecture. They
provide valuable correctives to primitivist aesthetic discourses that transpose
European values onto cultural contexts where they do not apply. Still, Andean
studies’ critique of Western aesthetic judgment – of mid-twentieth-century
Greenbergian formalism in particular – can shade into a broad, undifferentiated
mistrust of visual expression as cultural discourse.39 All too easily, it reaffirms
familiar Western hierarchies of visual expression (the primacy of text and
image), while draining Andean visual expression of its capacity to convey and
carry cultural arguments. In turn Inca artworks are cast as proxies or bearers
of ulterior verities – social, political, cosmological – rather than the means
by which those propositions were negotiated as cultural knowledge. Without
saying, the scholarship of Andean studies suggests how much is at stake in any
close reading of Inca art.
Here my analysis seeks to break down the rival essentialisms of the black
square (artwork as formalist monument) and the black box (artwork as socio-
logical document). I seek to reconcile those two rival positions by way of a third
term: visuality. My argument thus attends to visual work (cultural practice) as
well as visual works (morphologically or technologically elaborate objects).
Visuality addresses material things endowed with a social life of changing
contexts and uses. And no less, it recognizes visual acts as themselves culturally
prepared action – as habits of human apprehension and comprehension that
unfold within particular social, temporal, and physical occasions. To address
visuality is to consider human vision as a discursive construct of culture, at once
an artifact and a determinant of social experience. Such an approach promises
a deepened account of Inca visual works’ formal intricacy. It also opens up the
wider dimensions of those objects’ discursiveness as social expression.
From this larger methodological position, three subsidiary strategies follow.
The first addresses certain assumptions implicit in the tradition of art-historical
interpretation since the mid-twentieth century. Modernist criticism cast Inca
visual works as “a total geometric formality”: it recognized in Inca visual
expression both aesthetic self-sufficiency as visual composition, and the refu-
tation of all artistic and historical precedent.40 My argument counters that
individual Inca works did not stand alone; nor did the wider Inca visual tradi-
tion stand in opposition to Andean precedents and peers. My analysis addresses
specifically Inca forms of art and visual experience, although my discussion
encompasses works by the Incas’ antecedents and contemporaries: works by
the cultures of Cerro Sechı́n, Paracas, Tiwanaku, Wari, Chancay, and Chimú
make significant appearances in the book’s pages. Those works were produced
14 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

among disparate societies, in different historical eras, and for distinct cultural
purposes. Even so, to consider Inca artworks in light of those non-Inca artistic
precedents and peers hardly decontextualizes Inca art, nor does it argue for
any sort of ahistorical Andean-ness among the region’s cultural production.
Instead, it is to reintegrate the Inca art into the broader Andean tradition
whence the Inca works sprang, and to which they were addressed. Indeed, the
public face of Inca power – the face that would be brandished before Spanish
observers at the provincial Inca center of Cajamarca – was drawn from dis-
courses of sensory experience and cosmological order that were widely shared
among the Andes’ disparate peoples.41 As Inca imperial rhetoric spoke to the
Incas’ ancestral forebears and subaltern clients, so too do the works of the
Andes’ various regional traditions comment on Inca imperial rhetoric. “Do
they have anything better to do?” Atawallpa would remark of an Ecuadorian
community forced to weave the supple garment of bat hair he sometimes wore
on his person.42
My second position addresses archaeological scholarship of Andean studies.
Here I seek to put Inca visual expression into sustained engagement with the
semantics of language generally, and with the semantic operation of native
Andean languages in particular. Post-Enlightenment archaeology has done
much to recuperate and interpret the pre-contact Andean cultural record.
The Inca have assumed impressive historical concreteness in the scholarship of
Andean studies, and no small degree of sophistication as cultural protagonists
and agents. Though if empiricism is the foundation of that scholarship’s great
successes, it is also the source of certain of its limitations as cultural analysis.43
In these pages I turn to scholarship on Andean-language sources in order to
bring forward key aspects of the Inca cultural imaginary. The limitations of
the Andean cultural record mean that some linguistic data I employ are drawn
from sources separated by many years; I do so not to erase the contingency
of context and the historical process, but to help recuperate a cultural and
linguistic tradition otherwise so threatened by history’s contingencies.
My analysis also considers the broader capacities of Andean languages as
embodied expressive-sensorial practice. Inca visual experience was bound to
language and its devices – to sound, to the interdependence of the speech act
and the performative context, to the co-participation of social life. In language,
the Inca articulated the engagement – the identity, even – of visual experience
with other sensory stimuli, moral affects, and states of social being/becoming.
This is to say that Inca visuality acceded to a discursiveness that was not
properly visual in our sense – not, that is, a function of opticality alone. The
Incas’ culture of visual experience was something like a corporeal schema in
which sensory and social energies “straddled the divide between mind and
body, cognition and sensation.”44 In the Andean linguistic record, then, we
are afforded an opportunity to explore the relationship of vision to the body,
INTRODUCTION 15

and to test the engagement of sight with other, equally encultured faculties of
sense perception.
Finally, my account of Inca art also seeks to position its analysis within the
framework of the global historical process, as well as Andean prehistory. The
larger history of contact between Europeans and Andean peoples is an old story,
if one freshly informed by recent archival/historical research and postcolonial
revisionism.45 More, the problem of gaze has assumed a crucial position in
postcolonial studies, particularly after Homi Bhabha’s influential account of
“the anomalous gaze of otherness” and “mimicry.”46 In that argument the
chiasmic structure of vision organizes colonial subject-positions within a desta-
bilizing anamorphosis – a configuration of seer, seeing, and seen-to-be-seeing.
Bhabha’s shrewd redeployment of Lacanian poetics has sharpened critical atten-
tiveness to the trans- and intercultural operations of visuality in the early mod-
ern Andes. Recent scholarship has pointed out the ways native Andean visual
codes were inscribed into ostensibly European structures of pictorial com-
position and fields of legibility, and conversely, how European iconographic
and representational codes were incorporated into traditional Andean visual
media.47 This scholarship has unseated old verities concerning the dominance
of a Eurocentric “art of the victor” in the Viceroyalty of Peru.48 That com-
plicated history began at Cajamarca. As early modern European witnesses
looked on, the Incas’ order of sensory experience unfurled in all its complex
elaboration.
If a study of Inca visuality, this study retains the term “art” in its analysis of
Inca visual experience and its correlate forms of spatial and material expression.
This usage does not purport to identify any ancient Andean category of cultural
production or period-term of experience.49 Nor does it intend to recuperate
or otherwise insist on the anthropological relevance of schemes of universalized
aesthetic judgment. Instead, art is employed here as a term of critical awareness
and historiographic self-identification: “Art” identifies a mode of humanistic
interpretation and its attendant critical sensitivities. It offers acknowledgment
not only of the works themselves, but of the complicated work those objects
performed in Inca social experience. Art appears in these pages as a means to
identify the intricacy of Inca visual expression as poetic form.

a note on orthography is also in order. in general i hope to take a

middle path between the early modern European orthographies and those
proposed in more recent linguistic scholarship. The orthography inherited
from the early modern period often misrepresents the Quechua language
employed by the Inca, whereas recent scholarship has done much to recap-
ture the linguistic and historical specificity of this and other native Andean
languages. Even so, those spellings introduced in early modern lexica and
16 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

administrative writings have a long tradition in Latin American arts and letters,
and they are to be respected for this reason alone. Contemporary linguistic
orthographies offer increasingly nuanced renditions of the Incas’ language:
Pachacuti/Pachakuti/Pachakutiq. Even so, they are best understood as working
notes among linguistic specialists. These newer systems are themselves subject
to significant, ongoing emendation: the most up-to-date orthography may
contain – and so conceal – significant linguistic errors, as Rodolfo Cerrón-
Palomino has long argued in the instance of the mid-twentieth-century’s revi-
sionist spelling of “Cuzco.”50
In general, I employ the orthographic conventions employed by archaeolo-
gist Terrence N. D’Altroy in his recent authoritative survey of Inca archaeology
and prehistory. In the instance of indigenous-language terms and proper names,
I follow the spellings in his “Glossary of Foreign Terms.”51 In many instances,
particularly those involving wordplay and polysemy, I retain the spellings of
early modern literary sources: aucay camayoc. If plagued by linguistic inac-
curacies, elisions, and conflations, that traditional orthography also preserves
meaningful ambiguities (“paranomasia”) in the language.
CHAPTER ONE

LLAMAS AND THE LOGIC OF THE GAZE

Antes de hora de bisperas llegamos a vista del pueblo que es muy grande: y hallamos muchos pastores y
carneros . . . 1
Late in the afternoon we caught sight of the town, which is very grand; and we were given to
see many shepherds and llamas . . .
Cristóbal de Mena, 1534

We are taught to identify Andean South America’s Inca visual tradition in cer-
tain artistic media and morphologies of form: in regular, geometric composi-
tions, for instance, and in intricate though anonymous production techniques.
We are also given to understand Inca art by its refusals – by what it does not
employ: no texts and very few visual images, principally, and only a narrow
lexicon of iconographic signs.2 Those judgments beg revision, though not for
any connoisseurial lapse or mischaracterization. The problem is one of ana-
lytic perspective. In that scholarly understanding of the Inca visual tradition is
founded on the objects now housed in the world’s storehouses and museums,
we take too narrow a view. So suggests Cristóbal de Mena’s report of the long,
broad vista from the road above Cajamarca, Peru.
In early modern Peru, the Castilian word carnero, “animal” or “sheep,”
referred to Andean camelids.3 “Llamas – they are this country’s sheep” (llamas,
que son los carneros de la tierra) wrote a Spanish Jesuit in Cuzco in the mid-
seventeenth century.4 Iberian administrators and settlers used the word carnero

17
18 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

to refer to several species, the llama (lama glama), guanaco (lama glanicoe), and
alpaca (vicugna pacos). Guanacos are wild animals, whereas alpacas are smaller,
more delicate lamoids raised for their fine wool. The llama was the princi-
pal species in Inca herds, and those are the animals that Mena and his fellow
soldiers witnessed grazing in the Cajamarca valley. The llama was first bred
from guanacos around the second millennium b.c.e.5 By the sixteenth century
c.e., thousands of years of selective breeding had yielded an animal that was
tall and sturdy. Stray llamas do not form wild herds, for they do not survive
outside captivity. Now as when Mena saw them, llamas exist only as a domes-
ticated species. In broadest ontological terms, llamas were part of the Andes’
indigenous social practice, not its natural environment. They are to be read as
Andeans understood them, as creatures of empire and instruments of cultural
power.
Of course, as its history is traditionally told, the meeting at Cajamarca
turns on horses, not llamas. Mi tierra se ganó á la gineta, wrote Cuzco-born
Garcilaso de la Vega in the early seventeenth century: “My country was won
by horsemen.”6 Pizarro’s horsemen were impetuous fighters, men disposed to
risky battlefield lunges. They were masters of tactical feints and gambits, as
well as the “fierce and unnatural cruelty” of sudden violence.7 “Once he got
close enough,” it was recalled of one of Pizarro’s horseman, “he wheeled and
reared his horse such that the Incas who sat nearby spooked and leapt to their
feet out of fear.”8 “Understand that this kind of combat is not for any rider,”
advised another horseman to his sons, “but for the true mounted man-at-
arms.”9
The violence of Pizarro’s cavalrymen in Peru has come to be recognized
as paradigmatic of early modern Europeans’ broader capacity for deepened,
knowing aggression. In their capacity for opportunistic, self-consciously cul-
tivated brutality, Pizarro’s horsemen are cast not merely as late medieval mil-
itary functionaries, but bearers of modernity itself. In that historical affilia-
tion, we recognize in Pizarro’s horsemen certain of de Certeau’s arguments
concerning kinesis and “tactical” action: arbitrary, capricious, often trans-
gressive, such tactical movement eludes, even breaks down the strategies
by which hegemonic institutions seek to determine or constrict individual
action.10 Horses were the way forward, the next step in the Andes’ historical
evolution.
The approach of Pizarro’s company to the Cajamarca valley would seem
only to reaffirm those narratives. Under the imperial gaze of Mena and the
rest of Pizarro’s soldiers, Cajamarca’s Inca landscapes were subsumed beneath
so many naturalized Western conventions of landscape and power.11 Within
a day, the tactical violence of the Pizarro’s men would bring the pre-contact
Inca cultural order to a close. Such argument obscures the static frameworks
of cultural understanding that Europeans brought to Cajamarca. It also ignores
LLAMAS AND THE LOGIC OF THE GAZE 19

the kinetic structures of ecology, economy, and cultural experience in which

Mena and the rest of Pizarro’s men now found themselves.

the report of the soldier cristóbal de mena was the first narrative
of the Peruvian campaign to appear in print, and it was a best seller.12 Mena’s
description of the Cajamarca basin was the West’s first entry into that landscape
as well. The Inca town was “great” (grande), Mena told his readers: other
soldiers would assert that the settlement’s central plaza was “bigger than any
in Spain,” and its architecture “more stout than any we had seen before.”13
Castilans were prepared to admire Peru’s monumental architecture, given the
imprint of Rome on the urban fabric of Iberia’s ancient towns. They also
admired the Inca army, then camped in white tents (toldos blancos) in a side-
valley on the basin’s opposite side.14 Grazing animals (carneros) did not possess
the same cultural gravity.15 Even so, the deep vista into a pastoral landscape had
its own cultural pedigree: the view of flocks in a peaceful valley was a familiar
device in late medieval romances of chivalry. Mena offered his European
readership an image drawn from an old literary trope: the Cajamarca valley
as verger – in vernacular romance, a verdant garden landscape without the
protection of enclosing walls.16 After a long march through the highland Andes,
the Cajamarca valley beckoned as a locus amoenus in the hostile wilderness. The
lands of Peru, the European reader was to understand, awaited the hero’s acts
of possession.
And so a foundational episode in the emergence of Europe’s imperial gaze
was grounded in literary commonplace. One fable of power occluded another,
as the landscape of European chivalry was superimposed over its native Andean
rival. Though that overwritten Inca landscape is just visible in Mena’s account.
The author insists on those Andean “sheep” (carneros): the animals are not sim-
ply recalled as present in Cajamarca’s surrounding fields (estaban, or se encuen-
tran), nor were they just seen there (vimos). No, those shepherds and sheep were
“encountered” or “discovered”: hallamos . . . carneros, “we were given to come
across . . . many llamas,” recalled Mena, employing an expression of marked
intensification.17
This passage may be only the unwieldy language of a soldier. Even so,
Mena’s emphasis grows less surprising if we consider the number of animals
he and his companions witnessed. Sixteenth-century archival records from the
Andean highlands suggest that under Inca administration a large valley system
such as Cajamarca’s supported tens of thousands of camelids.18 The view of
Mena and the others took in tens of thousands of animals, perhaps 50,000 or
more. Those large numbers cannot be pegged exactly, but they well exceed
the sylvan fictions of late-medieval romance. Indeed, after the rout of the Inca
army a day later, the animals would “infest” the abandoned camp – embarasan el
20 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

real, wrote the expedition’s notary – such that Pizarro would order the animals’
indiscriminate slaughter.19 But for now, the landscape that confronted Mena
was overrun with the Incas’ animals.
Mena’s admiration for Inca architecture and urbanism was widely shared
among early modern Europeans and among Western travelers and archaeolo-
gists since. Inca practices of ecological management and exploitation did not
receive the same interest, or recognition in the canons of aesthetic judgment
their writings came to inform. Pastoralism seemed to have no place among the
exalted expressions of civilization – monumental architecture and sculpture,
figuration and epic narrative in the visual arts, writing systems and literature.
Since the late-eighteenth century, camelids have been posed as caricatures
of the Andes’ backward peasant economies and ancestral Neolithic lifeways
(Fig. 1).20 Even in anthropological archaeology of Inca studies, pastoralism
remains a second-tier problem: archaeology’s models of social complexity favor
agricultural systems and the settlement typologies with which they are allied.21
In an important 1965 article, the distinguished Andean historian John Murra
felt compelled to apologize for the Incas’ llamas: Inca pastoralism, he protested,
was neither a Freudian “llama complex” nor “irrational.”22

transhumance is the term that describes the movement of herds from

one pasture to another. By it, domesticated animals are shifted to different feed-
ing grounds, moved as an overlay to an alternate set of geographic coordinates.
In turn, the transhumed herd redefines the territory to which it is transferred:
however that landscape had been understood before, it is now pasture, a field
of grazing animals. At the same time, however, the ruminant overlay does
not efface the previous landscape, so much as render it a palimpsest. The
traces of that other landscape persist in asserting themselves, as if pressing back
against the grazing ruminants’ faces and toepads. And so transhumance is an
apt description of the complexly stratified Andean cultural landscape beneath
the overlay of Mena’s chivalric imagination.
The Cajamarca valley lies in the broad region of the northern Peruvian
highlands between the Sierra Blanca range to the west and the Sierra Negra to
the East. The basin is around five to six kilometers wide east to west and perhaps
three times that long north to south (Figs. 2 and 3). Roughly rectangular in
shape, the valley runs northwest-southeast in conformance with the prevailing
geologic bias of the Andean mountain chain. The valley’s sides are irregular,
given alternately to steep, rocky mountainsides or narrow side-valley openings.
The valley is high in elevation, about 2700 meters above sea level along its
bottom. It is warm and temperate by highland Andean standards, with good soil
and ample water. When the Europeans arrived there, Cajamarca was the largest
and most productive agricultural region in the highlands of northern Peru.
LLAMAS AND THE LOGIC OF THE GAZE 21

1. Stereoview, Keystone Company, ca. 1920: “Llamas, S. American cousins of the Camel,
Resting between Journeys, Cerro de Pasco, Peru.”

Pizarro’s company of soldiers approached Cajamarca from the north. They

had entered the Inca realm at its far northwestern margins, marching from
the coastal settlement of Tangarará, Ecuador, to highland Cajamarca over a
period of about three months. It was a journey of several hundred miles, and
they arrived at Cajamarca exhausted. Even so, Pizarro’s band made the trip
with relative ease. Moving along Inca highways, the Europeans had merely to
proceed along roads laid through the Andean landscape by the Inca state.23
The highways were between four and ten meters wide, paved with stones or
gravel.24 The route into the highlands just extended before them. Its smooth
grades and straight runs cut efficiently through the Andes’ difficult terrain –
along the edges of northern Peru’s coastal deserts, through gaps in the moun-
tains, past sources of water and pasturage, storage-houses and shelters.25 The
Inca road entered Cajamarca by way of a narrow valley north of the main
basin, most likely along the same path as the present highway National Route
3N. The Europeans crested the final grade above Cajamarca late in the day,
arriving there among squalls, long shadows, and rich colors.
Andean South America is a region of great geographic diversity, and harsh
extremes of terrain, climate, and seasonal cycles. In the broad Andean land-
scape, islands of fertility and abundance are dispersed among vast oceans of
barrenness. In this environment, Inca patterns of political administration, set-
tlement, and ecological exploitation were “archipelagic”: so many geograph-
ically dispersed islands of production were bound together within far-flung
systems of differentiated but complementary resource-exploitation.26 This
was also true of the Andes’ sacred geography: centers of sacred authority
were dispersed among inert hinterlands. As sacral center-places, Inca dynastic
22 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

2. Route of the Pizarro expedition across the Andean Region, 1531–34. “Caxamarca” near
center at 7˚09ʹ25ʺS, 78˚31ʹ03ʺW. Map from Clements R. Markham, Reports on the discovery of
Peru, vol. I (London: Hakluyt Society, 1872).
LLAMAS AND THE LOGIC OF THE GAZE 23

3. Map of the Cajamarca valley. Map by William L. Nelson.

centers and administrative settlements lay within the successive zones of their
proximate and distant peripheries. At once radiant and gravitational, those
centers anchored the centrifugal and centripetal energies that moved across
the concentric landscapes in which they were set.
This is to say that the sacred centers of the Andes – the Inca adminis-
trative center of Cajamarca among them – typically lay at the end of long
journeys. To be sure, they were fixed places, locales of concrete geographical
and spatial coordinates. Though the Andean center of authority also acceded
to the status of sacral heterotopia – the elevated status of a qozqo (cuzco) –
by means of the physical movement, temporal duration, and staged progress
toward or away from it. Andean centers were thus constructed from the allied
24 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

4. The Cajamarca valley viewed from its western shoulder: Cerro Apolonia at center middle
ground, Plaza de Armas (former Inca main plaza) immediately behind. (Photo: Eduardo Peláez)

dramas of departure and arrival and the long, graduated interval of movement
between. It had been so from the time of the Andes’ earliest oracular centers,
which emerged through practices of long-distance pilgrimage.27 The Euro-
peans’ progress toward Cajamarca valley presence numbers among the last, and
certainly best documented, narratives of sacred space and experience of the
“long pre-contact” Andean world.
A road leads to the rim of a mountain basin. The constricted space of a
blind slot-valley opens out into a deeper vista into the Cajamarca basin. Weeks
of travel through the highland Andes came into still focus in a fixed prospect,
a “viewshed.”28 Below a formal settlement is seen, and beyond it, animals
grazing in the fields. Mena and the others in the Pizarro company experienced
a moment of perceptual discomfiture, hallamos muchos pastores y carneros. The
Pizarro company had been enlisted in an elaborate dramaturgical scheme
choreographed by the Inca state. The route taken and the view given were
prepared events, calculated instances of scenographic experience.
From Mena’s position at the valley’s northern limits, the observer sighted
south, down the length of the basin. The highland landscape was for the most
part treeless, and the air dry: the gaze traveled far. The main Inca settlement
lay near at hand in the valley’s northwestern corner. Set at the eastern base
of an abrupt rocky prominence now known as Cerro Santa Apolonia, the
planned town made an orderly figure on the valley bottom (Figs. 4 and 5).29
The settlement was marked by the geometry of its formal architecture, as well
as its color – the reflective, high gray of stonemasonry, and the strong yellows
and reds of painted walls. A large rectangular plaza was fronted on three sides
by broad stone buildings; the plaza’s fourth side was defined by a wall and a
LLAMAS AND THE LOGIC OF THE GAZE 25

5. Rendering of the Cajamarca settlement by Emiliano Harth Terré. From Horacio H. Urteaga,
El fin de un imperio; obra escrita en conmemoración del 4 ̊ centenario de la muerte de Atahuallpa (Lima:
Librerı́a e Imprenta Gil, 1933).

portal that faced east, across the valley. The main road moved into the valley
from that entry. The road crossed the basin in a straight line, then turned south
as it neared the valley’s eastern shoulder about six kilometers away.30 Two small
rivers crossed the valley floor; they joined into a single stream near the center
of the valley as they flowed south. The road ran across their swampy banks as
an elevated causeway.31 The Incas’ animals grazed in the fields to either side.
Muchos . . . carneros, “Many llamas”: Petroglyphs from Chile’s Atacama
Desert give some sense of the scene that met Mena’s eye (Fig. 6). Petro-
glyphs scattered among that region’s oases and watering holes record the same
culture of camelid pastoralism that the Inca state imposed on the Cajamarca
valley several thousand kilometers to the north. Thanks to the diligent work of
Chilean investigators, the rock carvings of the Atacama’s upper Rı́o Loa region
are now well documented.32 The boulders and cliff walls of that region may
bear sprawling, elaborate depictions of grazing Inca llama herds. These petro-
glyphs commonly depict many, many animals in jumbled profusion. Round
and cruciform motifs indicate stones to which the animals were tethered for
pasturing. The occasional drover is present. Those human figures wear the
characteristic Inca garment of a decorated square tunic. Petroglyphs like these
occur along old Inca trading routes in Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. They
26 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

appear to record the passage of Inca pack trains past local shrines and water-
ing holes.33 Under Inca administration, the ancient pastoral tradition of the
Atacama region was incorporated into broader Andean networks of communi-
cation, trade, and warfare.34 That kinesis was vested with new political urgency
as cultural discourse: so the animals worked into the rock faces of the Atacama
attest, and so, several thousand kilometers north, could Mena see as he looked
into the Cajamarca valley.

the cajamarca valley was incorporated into the inca empire sometime
after the mid-fifteenth century c.e. By 1532 the settlement was the Incas’ most
important installation in the northern Peruvian highlands.35 Within the ideol-
ogy of Inca governance, Cajamarca was itself another Cuzco (qozqo) – a sacred
center that replicated the ritual and administrative functions of the imperial
capital within the local province.36 Its urban plan was laid out in imitation of
the Inca capital fourteen hundred kilometers to the south. The town’s most
impressive buildings and monumental spaces replicated the ceremonial and
administrative architecture of the Inca capital.
As was the imperial capital, central Cajamarca was bound to its surround-
ing valley by a complex network of line-of-sight visibility and processional
routes known to the Inca as zeq’e (in sixteenth-century Castilian orthography,
ceques).37 Individually, those axes of movement and intervisibility bound Inca
observers to historical landmarks, mythological locales, and supernatural land-
forms within the visible landscape. Together, the many sightlines and avenues
of “the zeq’e system” imposed a hierarchy of relation on the landscape of the
Cajamarca valley, positing the seat of Inca administration as a sacral center-
place. They articulated the Inca administrative installation as an orienting pole
whence lines of sight and mobile bodies radiated out into and converged
inward from the settlement’s hinterland.
The zeq’es of Inca Cuzco were relatively well documented in sixteenth-
century Spanish administrative reports. They were probably forty-two in num-
ber; all of them converged on the Inca temple of state at the center of urban
Cuzco.38 No such administrative record survives for the provincial Inca center
of Cajamarca. Even so, certain traces of the Incas’ sacred landmarks and net-
works of intervisibilty are not hard to discern in the Cajamarca valley. They
include the old Inca road that cut rail-straight across the valley floor from the
town to a set of hot springs on the opposite side of the valley. There is also
the rocky hill now known as Cerro Santa Apolonia, an imposing prominence
that juts up from the valley floor just to the east of the old Inca settlement;
carved ledges and pedestals mark lookout positions at the hill’s peak. The hill,
too, is connected to the main settlement by an old Inca road that traces a
straight line of sight to Cajamarca’s central plaza. A canal system in the hills
LLAMAS AND THE LOGIC OF THE GAZE 27

6. Inca-era rock carving from the Atacama region of northern Chile. From Flora Vilches V.
and Mauricio Uribe R., “Grabados y pinturas del arte rupestre tardı́o de Caspana,” Estudios
Atacameños 18 (1999), Fig. 4.

west of town draws water from among prominent geological formations and
narrow side valleys; rock carvings along that canal’s path recognize lines of
sight through those natural features.39 An eighteenth-century churchman and
historian reported the remains of an elaborate Inca shrine on the nearby moun-
tain of Tantalluc.40 Other than this reference, little written evidence exists to
conffirm the Incas’ recognition of those features as cultural landmarks; even so,
they are obvious components of Inca Cajamarca’s sacred landscape. And then
there is Mena’s account, which cites a line of sight that replicates principles of
Inca landscape planning found in the Cusqueño administrative records. While
there can be no sure telling, Mena’s report appears to document an Inca zeq’e;
his account amply recalls the forms of sacred visual experience identified with
such planned views across Inca imperial landscapes.
The valley prospect before Pizarro’s soldiers constituted a planned Inca zeq’e
that was defined by the line of sight from the road at the northern edge of the
valley to the urban center and its surrounding fields. In turn, that view triggered
in the observer a form of response broadly recognized in the Quechua-speaking
tradition as wak’a.41 The term is inexact, a fact that owed in no small measure
to its entanglement with sixteenth-century Spanish campaigns of religious
extirpation.42 In the most general sense, a wak’a may be identified as a sacred
happening, an event that occasions conditions of elevated phenomenological
and cultural experience. It was an intensified state of being linked to sudden,
28 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

disruptive variance in the stream of sensory perception and cognitive awareness.

The wak’a was performative and phenomenologically chiasmic, a function of
human affective response. The Incas’ wak’akuna (or, wak’as) triggered limbic
states of surprise, fear, or excitement: these bodily affects were among the
principal responses by which Andeans recognized the divine.43
The term wak’a was by no means specific to Inca discourses of vision or
landscape. It is the case, however, that the Inca specifically identified certain
episodes of vision in the landscape as wak’a. This fact is documented in colonial
Spanish inventories of the zeq’es and allied sacred locales once venerated as
sacred by the pre-contact Inca state in the Cuzco valley. Those lists cite places
along the major roads outside Cuzco as wak’a. In each case, the wak’a was
identified and venerated on the basis of the perceptual reorientation that
travelers experienced as they passed those points in the road. They are recorded
in the colonial lists much as Mena’s account describes his experience at the edge
of the Cajamarca basin: “A high road . . . where the view of the city fell away,”
reads one. Another says, “a gulley along the road . . . at which point the view
of the valley of Cuzco is lost.”44 And another again: “A hill at which point the
vista onto Cuzco disappears.”45 The wak’a of Cuzco generally cite movement
away from the main settlement; this is a documentary ellipsis of much more
dynamic centrifugal and centripetal energies in Cuzco’s landscape. In every
case, the wak’a is cited on the basis of the perceptual reorientation that travelers
experienced as they passed those portions of road. The records note views that
opened up and closed again as the traveler moved through the countryside,
or particular points at which prominent features were momentarily framed
in the landscape (between “portals” or “little openings” puerta, porteçuela): “A
flat spot between two hills where the view of one is blocked and the view
onto the other opens up, and only for this reason they worshipped it.”46 Still
other cited instances of wak’a mark the uncanny resemblance between distinct,
unrelated landforms: they mark, that is, the instant of the mobile viewer’s
sudden recognition of visual similitude among distinct and widely separated
landscape features.47
Unexpected viewsheds and eye-catching prospects were components of the
network of zeq’es around Inca Cajamarca; they were also part of a broader Inca
culture of “dynamic display” – the processions, ritual treks, and other jour-
neys by which Inca bodies moved through sacred landscapes.48 In turn, those
kinetic phenomena carried forward more ancient Andean traditions of “land-
scapes of movement.”49 Andeans’ interventions in the landscape – scratchings
into rock faces, shifted soil, carved boulders – alternately marked routes of
movement or anchored long-distance viewsheds that opened along the jour-
ney. The Nasca lines – monumental geoglyphs now recognized as processional
avenues and lines of sight – offer a well-known instance of this broad Andean
tradition.50 Elsewhere in the southern Andes, groups of geoglyphs addressed
LLAMAS AND THE LOGIC OF THE GAZE 29

7. Geoglyphs near Iquique, Chile. (Photo: author.)

broad desert pans along caravan routes: at such sites as Iquique, Chile, costume
patterns, llamas, and other power symbols were inscribed onto hillsides over-
looking a major Inca artery of traffic (Fig. 7).51 Monumental geoglyphs could
also occur in the agricultural landscapes of the Andean highlands. Above the
town of Macuspana (Huarochirı́ Province, Perú), for instance, a processional
avenue moved through an elaborate system of agricultural terraces toward a
sacred mountain peak (Mt. Koryokpa); the path moved through a monumental
geoglyph that inscribed the stepped motif of a sacred mountain.52
The Inca and other Andeans recognized in the universe a complex economy
of coursing energies and shifting balances, “an endemic restlessness” of numi-
nous force.53 The Andean discourse of mobile energies was encoded in the
circulation of bodies through the landscape. Those kinetic bodies were them-
selves a medium of transformation and energy relay. The Incas’ sacred landscape
existed only to the extent that it was inhabited by sentient, responsive bodies.
That landscape’s mobile energies excited sacral states of affective human experi-
ence, and its sacrality was constituted in them. The Incas’ wak’as recognized and
facilitated that kinesis, marking those points in the landscape where its energies
were strongest because most sensible. The Inca understood the body’s states of
being as states of becoming: they were encoded into the Incas’ language, whose
structure encodes states of transformation and change: Quechua includes not
simply the verb “to be,” but proper vocabulary expressing “to be at,” “to
become,” “to get,” “to feign,” “to pretend to be.”54
Moving past the valley rim, Pizarro’s company passed into the larger Caja-
marca basin, and from one framework of visibility to another. The view that
opened before them defined the “near valley” context – the line-of-sight to
the Inca settlement, which constituted the immediacy of that center’s power.55
30 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

The crest on the hill above the valley was a specific point in space, one terminus
of an Inca zeq’e that was fixed at its opposite end by the monumental settle-
ment and its surrounding fields. This wak’a was a particular locus, though also
a condition of response and recognition. The wak’a’s potency lay in its ability
to fix the observer along an uncertain horizon line of present and not-present,
site-specific immediacy and disembodied imagination. That sacred place – that
is, the viewshed and the affect it triggered – was the boundary marker of the
Inca capital, its symbolic city gate. That emplaced experience was as much
part of the Incas’ imperial “infrastructure of control” as the system of roads
and way stations that had conveyed the Europeans to the rim of the Cajamarca
basin.56 “It is like a portal,” a Spanish Jesuit recalled of one wak’a at the crest
of the Cuzco valley.57

the view into the valley was oriented on the inca settlement’s
formal architecture and radiating roads. It also encompassed the more fluid
if no less stark fact of Incas’ great herd of llamas: in those animals, multiple
temporal frameworks of Andean cultural practice came to fullness and peaked
in unison. They marked the unsettling culmination of at least three develop-
ments: several thousand years of Andean ecological practices; the centuries-
long evolution of the Inca state; and the recent meteoric expansion of Inca
military power into the northern Andes.
Mena and the others in Pizarro’s band had seen llamas in the highlands,
though not in these numbers. Few Andeans had witnessed a herd of this
size, either. It was an extraordinary sight, for a vast flock of llamas is the
product of the least elastic elements of the Andean ecology – land, time,
and luck. Selective breeding over thousands of generations left the animals
with key biological weaknesses: low fertility, newborn frailty, and vulnerability
to disease.58 A gestation period of eleven months yields a single offspring;
newborn crias easily succumb to cold and predators. Frost, hail, and lightning
are common at high elevation; bad weather and disease may nullify years of
increase. (The highland fox, atoq, occupies a place of particular ambivalence
in the lore of highland Andean pastoralists.59 ) It is also the case that herd
propagation cannot be intensified in the same way as agriculture. There exists
no means to increase the rate or speed the cycles of the animals’ reproduction.
Increasing a herd’s size requires more (and better) land, more animals, and more
time. Any large herd was an indication of superlative wealth; it was power in
the raw.
Inasmuch as the great herd intruded into the minds of its witnesses, those
animals also obstructed awareness of the valley’s fundamental economic activ-
ity: maize agriculture. Under Inca administration, this region was one of
LLAMAS AND THE LOGIC OF THE GAZE 31

8. Pair of beakers depicting birds in a cornfield, Inca (south coast), ca. 1100–1438 c.e., gold, each
7 × 7.3 cm. Kate S. Buckingham Endowment, 1955.2589 a-b, The Art Institute of Chicago.
Photography  C The Art Institute of Chicago.

the highlands’ great centers of maize production.60 Inca social practice and
administrative protocol required beer, and beer required corn.61 The provi-
sion of corn beer at feasts was one of the principal means by which the Inka
state formed alliances, paid its moral debts, and confirmed the obligation of
its subjects.62 A pair of Inca-era metal drinking cups now in Chicago bear the
likenesses of birds in high corn: the cups depict the source of the beer they
bore to users’ lips (Fig. 8). To increase the production of corn in Cajamarca,
the Inca had resettled farming communities there from low-elevation regions
to the valley’s west and northwest: communities of Pacasmayo, Zaña, Collique,
Chuspo, Cinto, and Túcume were inserted into the valley’s social and physical
landscape.63 A community of potters was also moved to Cajamarca from the
Lambayeque River Valley; they produced the ceramics in which corn was
stored as grain, and later processed and served as food.64 Most of Cajamarca’s
corn appears to have been not consumed locally, but shipped south to meet
the needs of Cuzco and other centers of Inca dynastic power.65
Cajamarca and other large Andean valley systems are topographically and
climatologically varied environments. They consist of so many local microen-
vironments determined by altitude, topography, weather, soil conditions, and
the availability of water. Herding complemented maize agriculture because the
32 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

animals did not compete with corn for the scarce ecological resources of mid-
elevation. The animals were well suited to colder, windswept grasslands found
above 4000 m. There was always danger at that altitude – again, from hail,
hard freezes, and predation – but the animals did well in those high grasslands,
where they required few herders and no standing water. During the growing
season camelids were generally transhumed to those high pastures where corn
and other low- and mid-elevation crops will not grow. The animals’ dung
was used to enrich soils on which the animals themselves did not graze; prize
llamas were sacrificed to ensure the growing season’s rains.
The cultivation of Andean maize and camelids, archipelagic complementar-
ity, seasonal cycles of planting and grazing: all those phrases suggest an equi-
librium of culture and environment. They point to judicious planning, sound
economic administration, and careful husbanding of natural resources.66 Such
is an accurate characterization of Inca administration in the Cajamarca basin.
Though it is also a profound misrepresentation, for it significantly under-
represents the dynamism inherent in Inca practices of social and ecological
exploitation. Crop intensification and large herds of ruminant animals inflicted
profound disequilibrium on the valley’s environment. The Incas’ simplified,
maize-heavy crop mix stresses any soil, depleting its nutrients in only a few
seasons; hungry animals quickly exhaust pasture.67
That ecological volatility in the valley was accompanied by – it was accom-
plished through – correspondingly assertive alterations to Cajamarca’s social
landscape. Inca administration reconfigured the valley’s ethnic populations and
settlement patterns. The foreign communities resettled to the valley joined
an already complicated mosaic of peoples there. They upset local political
détentes and enmities alike, remanding all arbitration to higher, Inca author-
ity. By obscuring awareness of Cajamarca’s primary role in the wider Andean
economy, the animals grazing in the valley only underscored a deeper truth:
the Cajamarca valley was an imperial landscape, and thus profoundly unsettled.
All the volatility implicit in Inca administration was exacerbated now, at
the very time of the year Mena looked down into in the valley. The Andean
highlands are governed by an annual wet/dry weather cycle, and the wet season
generally comes to the northern Andes after mid-November. Temperatures
begin to climb at this time of the year, as does precipitation. The wet season’s
strong rains bring nourishment to the landscape, though also strain. The Incas’
corn was most vulnerable now after mid-November: planted in August and
September, the plants had been irrigated with canal water over the ensuing
months. The seed had germinated, and the young shoots were subject to
the vicissitudes of highland Andean weather – at once dependent on natural
rainfall and prone to the accidents of inclement weather.68 With the increased
humidity, too, came pests and disease: insects, rodents, and fungus. No other
phase of the agricultural cycle entailed such risk for the Inca cultural order.69
LLAMAS AND THE LOGIC OF THE GAZE 33

But there the animals were, gorging themselves on the basin’s young corn
and tender grasses: the great herds in the valley flatly denied the season’s dangers
to the agricultural cycle. Typically the Incas’ camelids were shifted away from
agricultural fields at this time of year. The animals were transhumed to higher
grasslands that burgeoned in the wet season’s rain and warm temperatures. It is
the case that Andean lamoids do not have the deleterious environmental impact
of European sheep.70 Even so, grazing animals will quickly destroy sprouted
cornfields. They will do more damage than this. Those ruminants on a valley’s
skirts and bottom pushed the valley well beyond its ecological carrying capacity.
To collect that many llamas in one pasture was to kill the land by overgrazing.
The flocks in Cajamarca’s fields disrupted the very agro-pastoral cycles that Inca
administration otherwise sought to sustain. With their transhumance to the
valley, the Inca sacrificed one logic of imperial administration to serve another.
The animals on the valley floor were not local livestock. Foreign to the valley,
they were pack animals, tens of thousands of mature, castrated males. They were
a military technology, their teeth grinding down the valley’s greenery. Their
management met the dictates of state-administered violence, not ecological
sustainability. They were the means to transport goods and materiel over long
distances, and to feed and ritually sustain an army on the march. Called by
the Incas wakaywa or apaq llama (“porter-llamas”), each animal could carry a
load of between 25 and 60 kg about 15 to 20 km per day.71 (By dint of heavy
loads or cultural protocol, royal caravans moved more slowly, perhaps only
4 km per day.72 ) Inca pack trains required relatively few handlers – perhaps
one per 15 to 30 animals. The animals were slaughtered to feed the army: they
were a ready source of food on the trail, “walking larders.”73 A 125-kg animal
yields 46 kg of meat, which is savory when fresh and more than palatable when
salted and dried.74 The animals’ blood and meat were sacrificed to the Incas’
supernatural patrons. Other than human beings, llamas were among the Incas’
most prestigious ritual offerings: it is for this reason that the handles of Inca
ceremonial knives often bear the likeness of camelids (Fig. 9).75 The great herd
was a means for long-distance mobility, a steady food supply on the trail, and
compliance with ritual obligation all the while: they were the basis of Inca
military force projection, creatures of empire.

the incas’ llamas hauled loads, ate marginal grasses, and produced
rich manure. They submitted to the knife handled by priest and butcher.
They hummed and clicked at signs of danger in the pasture; during Inca rit-
uals they emitted gurgling songs on cue.76 They were also keenly observant,
with good eyesight. But to Inca understanding, llamas did not see. Vision was a
higher faculty, one the animals’ mere biological function could not encompass.
Only humans and supernatural beings possessed the capacity of vision: sight
34 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

9. Ceremonial knife, Inca, 1450–1540 c.e. Bronze. H. 15.7 cm; W. 16.4 cm. Dumbarton
Oaks, Pre-Columbian Collection, Washington, DC, PCB 482. Photo  C Trustees of Harvard
University.

in its fullest sense engendered thought, language, morality, and ethical conse-
quence.77 If the animals themselves did not see, they instigated the judgment
of those beings who did. To the Andean observer a great herd occasioned
moments of heightened recognition, forcing the awareness of cosmological
pattern and political order.
Here, then, in the temperate highland valley of Cajamarca was a force of
impressive size. It was ecologically intrusive, economically disruptive, and men-
acingly aggressive. In important respects the great herd of llama was also cultur-
ally foreign to the Cajamarca region. In the mythology of the Inca leadership,
camelids’ primordial origins were traced to the southern highlands. The first
camelids were understood by the Inca to have emerged from the high grass-
lands’ caves and glacial lakes.78 The animals’ fertility was comprehended as an
aspect of that sacred landscape’s generative capacity.79 In turn, camelids iden-
tified the Inca leadership’s mythological origins in those same landscapes: gold
and silver effigies of llamas – the “Gold” and “Silver Heralds” (cori napa, collque
napa) – were carried before the Inca ruler when he traveled.80 Like other
Inca effigies of camelids, those borne before the Inca ruler were executed
in precious materials infused with the visible essence of the southern Andes’
LLAMAS AND THE LOGIC OF THE GAZE 35

10. Silver llama figurine, Inca, ca. 1450–1532 c.e. H. 24.1 cm. American Museum of Natural
History B-1618. Courtesy of the Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural
History.

sacrality – the gold of sunlight at high elevation, and the silver of its moonlight.
A fine effigy in silver is preserved in New York’s Museum of Natural History
(Fig. 10). Other Inca camelid effigies were executed in minerals infused with
the strong, variegated colors of that region’s lightning strikes, rainbows, and
coronas (Fig. 11).81 The Incas’ affinity for the animals also followed from their
importance to the mobile, violent human lifeways of those high grasslands –
its nomadism, marauding, and caravan trading.82
If central to the ideological construction of Inca royal leadership, pastoral-
ism hardly played a defining role in Cajamarca’s economy. At the time of
the European arrival in the Andes, pastoralism had long since spread to the
northern Andean highlands and to low-altitude regions up and down the
coast. In the Cajamarca region, local elites had managed complex herding
economies for a thousand years or more.83 Even so, the southern highlands
remained the geographic and cultural heartland of the practice: pastoralism
there was historically deeper, more territorially inclusive, and more central
to local subsistence economies. In coastal areas, by contrast, camelid pas-
toralism was possible only through concerted husbandry.84 Well into the nine-
teenth century, observers reported high rates of mortality in llama caravans that
36 ART AND VISION IN THE INCA EMPIRE

11. Llama effigy (conopa), Inca, 1450–1540 c.e. Serpentine with inclusions of chromite. H.
5.6 cm. Dumbarton Oaks, Pre-Columbian Collection, Washington, DC, PCB 431. Photo  C
Trustees of Harvard University.

traveled to the Pacific from the highlands: “despite all the care taken, a great
number of llamas die in each journey to the coast” wrote naturalist Johann
von Tschudi in 1847.85 (In the early years of the colonial period, native artists
on Peru’s coast would anatomically conflate camelids with horses: like horses,
lamoids were exotic, prestigious animals sustained at great expense [Fig. 12].86 )
Colonial Spanish administrative records suggest that the Inca resettled herders
to Cajamarca from the Huambo district of the southern highlands.87 Even so,
it appears that the Inca maintained no permanent herds of great size there,
even at the height of Inca administrative presence in the region: Cajamarca’s
grain was carried south by human porters, not llamas.88
The herds in the Cajamarca valley thus superimposed one material and
cultural economy over another, and thus one geographic and cultural landscape
over another. As they grazed in the valley, the southern Andes’ grasslands and its
lifeways were emplaced in a mid-elevation valley in the northern Andes.89 This
symbolic remapping of the landscape and economy emphasized the mythic
southern origins of the dynastic Inca power, as well as the violence of the Inca
state’s expansion north into the Cajamarca region. That mythic template was
laid over the ecological and ethnic strains of a regional agricultural valley. This
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burthen, at a cost of £6000. About this time smuggling was carried
to a great height, even in broad day.
On January 20th, 1780, at a numerous meeting of citizens and
county gentlemen, a petition was agreed to and signed, praying the
house of commons to guard against all unnecessary expenditure, to
abolish sinecure places and pensions, and to resist the increasing
influence of the crown. A strong protest was afterwards signed
against the proceedings of this meeting. Mr. Coke presented the
petition. Armed associations were formed against the government
at Yarmouth, Lynn, Holt, and other places.
On March 24th, 1783, manufactures of textile fabrics in the city
being very prosperous, the pageant of the Golden Fleece, or what is
called Bishop Blaize, was exhibited by the wool combers, in a style
far surpassing all former processions of the kind in Norwich. The
procession began to move at 10 a.m. from St. Martin’s at Oak, and
thence passed through the principal streets of the city. On
December 3rd, of the same year, the Black Friars’ Bridge was
opened.
In January, 1784, the Amicable Society of Attorneys, in Norwich, was
instituted. On May 1st, at an assembly of the corporation, the
freedom of the city was voted to be presented to Mr. S. Harvey, Mr.
Windham, and Mr. Pitt. On December 13th, the Norwich Public
Library was first opened and located in the old library room, formerly
over the entrance to St. Andrew’s Hall.
On March 25th, 1785, mail coaches, between Norwich and London,
were established, performing a journey of 108 miles in fifteen hours,
by which alteration in the post, letters arrived from London a day
sooner. This was considered a great improvement. Subsequently,
half a dozen stage coaches ran between Norwich and London daily.
In July, after various ascents by several persons, Major (afterwards
General) Money, at 4.25 p.m., ascended with a balloon from
Quantrell’s gardens, and at 6 p.m. the car touched the surface of the
sea. During five hours the major remained in this perilous situation,
and at 11.30 p.m. was taken up by the Argus revenue cutter,
eighteen miles off Southwold, bearing west by north, and he landed
at Lowestoft on the following morning. On October 18th, of the
same year, the “Friars’ Society for the Participation of Useful
Knowledge” was instituted. This society first suggested the scheme
of the association for the relief of decayed tradesmen, their widows,
and orphans. With them also originated the Soup Charity in this city,
and it was long supported and conducted by them, but of late years
it has been a separate charity.
On April 26th, 1786, the Norwich and Norfolk Benevolent Medical
Society was instituted. In May, an exact account of the inhabitants
of Norwich was taken from house to house, and the population was
ascertained to be 40,051 souls, exclusive of those living in the
precincts of the Cathedral, being an increase of nearly 4000 since
1752. This entirely contradicts the statement of Mr. Arthur Young, in
his Tour of England, published in 1770, to the effect that 72,000
persons were then employed in manufactures in this city.
On November 5th, 1788, the centenary of the glorious Revolution of
1688 was celebrated in this city and county by illuminations,
bonfires, public dinners, &c., but more particularly at Holkham,
where Mr. Coke, the late Earl of Leicester, gave a grand fête, ball,
and supper, and a display of fireworks, &c. The citizens appear to
have been more sensible then than they are now of the immense
benefits they derived from that great change in the British
constitution and government.
Next year (1789) a revolution broke out in France and astounded all
Europe. It caused a mighty commotion and a general war, which
lasted many years, and destroyed millions of men. Norwich, like
every other city in England, was affected by it, and lost nearly all its
foreign trade during the terrible conflict. On July 14th, the
Revolution was commemorated by republicans at the Maid’s Head
Inn, in this city. Among the toasts of the day after a dinner were
“The Revolutionary Societies in England,” “The Rights of Man,” and
“The Philosophers of France.” The Revolution, however, had not
advanced very far in its atrocities when most people regarded it in a
very different light, and associations were formed here against
“Levellers” and “Revolutionists.”
On December 5th, 1792, the mayor, sheriffs, and seventeen
aldermen of Norwich, pledged themselves to support the constitution
of Kings, Lords, and Commons, as established in 1688. Meetings of
the inhabitants were also held in this city, and in Yarmouth, Lynn,
&c., and declarations of loyalty and attachment to the constitution
were unanimously agreed to and signed; for men had begun to be
alarmed by the “Reign of Terror” in France.
In 1793 a petition for parliamentary reform, signed by 3741
inhabitants of Norwich, was presented to the House of Commons by
the Hon. H. Hobart, but was not received, it having been printed
previous to presentation. This indicated a great advance in liberal
opinions towards the end of the last century, chiefly amongst the
Nonconformists, who had greatly increased in numbers, whilst the
church was asleep. The vast expenditure in the long war against
France caused a great increase in taxation.
On April 12th, 1794, a great county meeting was held at the
Shirehall, to consider the exertions which should be made at that
crisis for the internal defence and security of the kingdom. The High
Sheriff, T. R. Dashwood, Esq., presided. The Honble. C. Townshend
moved resolutions, supported by the Marquis Townshend, Lord
Walsingham, Mr. Buxton, Mr. Windham, and Mr. Joddrell, for forming
volunteer corps of cavalry, and for entering into subscriptions to
maintain the same. Mr. Coke condemned the war in toto, and
insisted that it might have been avoided, or at the least brought to a
conclusion, by a negociation for peace, and he moved as an
amendment:

“That it is our duty to refuse any private subscriptions for public

purposes and unconstitutional benevolences.”
So much altercation and confusion ensued, that when the High
Sheriff put the question, it was impossible to tell which party had the
majority; and a division being deemed impracticable, the chairman
proposed that such gentlemen as chose to subscribe would retire
with him to the Grand Jury Room, which was agreed to. Nearly
£6,000 was subscribed, and the amount was afterwards increased to
£11,000!
On October 21st, 1795, a memorial was transmitted from the court
of mayoralty of Norwich to the representatives of the city on the
high prices of every necessary of life, requesting them to support
such measures as might have a tendency to reduce them, and to
facilitate the restoration of peace. Prices of corn and provisions had
risen to an alarming height; wheat to 100s., barley to 30s., and oats
to 30s. per quarter, and symptoms of rioting had in consequence
appeared in Norwich market.
At a county meeting held on July 20th, 1796, in the Angel Inn (now
the Royal Hotel) it was resolved to petition parliament for the
removal of the Lent assizes from Thetford to Norwich, and a petition
was presented accordingly. The bill brought for this object into the
House of Commons was strongly opposed, and finally rejected; but
afterwards the assizes were removed to the city, and have been held
there ever since. This year the sum of £24,000 was collected for the
maintenance of the poor in Norwich, while the population was under
40,000, or half the present number.
In 1797, February 14th, the Norwich Light Horse Volunteers were
organized, of which John Harvey, Esq., was afterwards appointed
captain and major. On February 22nd, the Norwich Loyal Military
Association was formed, of which John Patteson, Esq., was
appointed captain, and afterwards major; and R. J. Browne, C.
Harvey, and A. Sieley, Esqs., were appointed captains. Military
matters then occupied a great deal of the attention of the citizens.
On March 4th, intelligence was received here of the defeat of the
Spanish fleet by Admiral Jervis, and served in some measure to
dissipate the general gloom which at this time pervaded the public
mind.
On April 25th, a great county meeting was held in the open air on
the Castle Hill, and a petition was almost unanimously adopted,
praying His Majesty to dismiss his ministers, as the most effectual
means of reviving the national credit and restoring peace. This was
moved by Mr. Fellowes, seconded by Mr. Rolfe, supported by Lord
Albemarle, Mr. Coke, Mr. Mingay, Mr. Plumptre, Mr. Trafford, and
others. On April 28th a counter county meeting was held, and an
address to the king was adopted, expressing confidence in the
ministry of the day.
On May 16th the citizens followed suit. At a numerously attended
common hall a petition to His Majesty, praying him to dismiss his
administration, was carried unanimously, with the exception of one
spirited Tory, who had nearly fallen a victim to popular vengeance on
the spot. A counter address of the citizens was afterwards signed
and presented to the King, who must have been a good deal
bothered at the time by such evidences of the violent agitation of his
subjects.
On May 26th, attempts were made here to seduce the military from
their allegiance; and on the following day the republican orator,
Thelwall, arrived in this city, which caused a great commotion. On
the 29th, a party of the Inniskilling Dragoons proceeded to his
lecture room, opposite Gurney’s bank, drove out the persons
assembled, destroyed the tribune and benches, and then attacked
the Shakespear Tavern adjoining, in which a disturbance had taken
place. After destroying the furniture and partly demolishing the
house, and also breaking the windows and destroying the furniture
of the Rose Tavern, in which they supposed the lecturer had
concealed himself, the dragoons, on the appearance of their officers
and the magistrates, retired to their barracks. Thelwall, in this
affray, fortunately for him, escaped and fled to London. Davey, the
landlord of the Shakespear Tavern, on being pursued by the soldiers,
threw himself from the garret into the street, and was much
injured. At the subsequent assizes, Luke Rice, a tailor of this city,
was indicted capitally for aiding and abetting the soldiers in this
outrage; but as the offence charged in the indictment did not come
within the meaning of the statute, he was acquitted. He had,
however, a very narrow escape. On June 1st of the same year,
(1797) a mutiny broke out on board the fleet at Yarmouth, and
several sail of the line hoisted the red flag of defiance.
In January, 1798, the sword of the Spanish Admiral Don Francisco
Winthuysen, presented by Admiral Nelson to the corporation of
Norwich, was placed in the Council Chamber of the Guildhall, with an
appropriate device and inscription.
On February 28th, at a general meeting of the inhabitants of this
city, more than £2,200 were immediately subscribed as voluntary
contributions towards the defence of the kingdom. In a few weeks
afterwards, the whole subscription amounted to more than £8000, a
proof of the loyalty as well as liberality of the well-to-do citizens. In
May, the following Loyal Volunteer Corps were formed for the
purpose of preserving internal tranquillity, and supporting the police
of this city, viz., the Mancroft Volunteers, Capt. John Browne; St.
Stephen’s Volunteers, Capt. Hardy; St. Peter per Mountergate, &c.,
Capt. Herring; St. Saviour’s and St. Clement’s, Capt. Fiske; St.
Andrew’s, Capt. T. A. Murray.
On June 19th, the Norwich Light Horse Volunteers and Loyal Military
Association attended J. Browne, Esq., to the cathedral, previous to
his being sworn into the office of mayor; afterwards the Association
fired a feu de joie in the Market Place.
On October 11th, at a meeting of the wealthy inhabitants of the city,
a subscription was entered into for the relief of the orphans of those
brave seamen who fell on August 1st in the ever memorable battle
of the Nile; and on the 24th of the same month, at a special
assembly of the corporation, an address of congratulation was
adopted to his Majesty on the late victory; and it was agreed that a
request should be made to Lord Nelson to sit for his portrait, to be
placed in St. Andrew’s Hall. His Lordship assented and the portrait
was painted by Beechey and placed in the hall, where it may still be
seen.
November 29th was appointed as a day of a public thanksgiving for
the late naval victories, and was celebrated as such in Norwich with
the greatest festivity. In the morning the mayor and corporation,
accompanied by the Light Horse Volunteers and the Parochial
Associations, attended divine service at the cathedral, where an
excellent sermon was preached by the Rev. T. F. Middleton,
afterwards Bishop of Calcutta. The sword, taken by Lord Nelson was
borne in the procession. On their return to the Market Place there
was a feast, and in the evening an illumination.
In 1799, October 28th, the Guards and several other regiments, to
the number of 25,000 cavalry and infantry, landed at Yarmouth from
Holland. Next night the Grenadier Brigade of Guards, commanded
by Col. Wynward, marched into Norwich by torchlight, and were
soon afterwards followed by upwards of 20,000 more troops.
Through the exertions of John Herring, Esq., mayor, and the
attention of the citizens in general, these brave men received every
accommodation that their situation demanded. The mayor soon
afterwards received a letter from the Duke of Portland expressive of
the high appreciation by the government of the mayor’s loyalty and
activity on this occasion, and of the humanity of the citizens who
supplied the wants of the soldiers. The mayor was afterwards
presented to his Majesty at St. James’, and offered the honour of
knighthood, which he declined. The Duke of York, Prince William of
Gloucester, and several other officers employed in this unsuccessful
expedition, also passed through the city on their way to London.
The sum of £18,000 was raised this year for the maintenance of the
poor of the city.
On January 23rd, 1800, John Herring, Esq., then mayor, summoned
a general meeting of the inhabitants at the Guildhall, to consider the
propriety of applying to parliament for an act for the better paving,
lighting, and watching of the city, for removing and preventing
annoyances and obstructions, and for regulating hackney coaches.
At this meeting a committee was appointed to consider the plan
proposed, and to report to a future general meeting. This
committee held several meetings, and at length made a report,
which was laid before a general meeting of the citizens on March
3rd. The estimated cost of lighting, watching, paving, &c., was only
£2770. The produce of the tolls was estimated at £1715, and of a
rate of 6d. in the pound at £3000; making the total receipts £4715,
and leaving a balance of £1945 for the commencement of the work,
which sum would have been increased by some annual payments.
The general meeting adopted the report, and a petition was signed
by most of the inhabitants of the city in favour of a bill to carry out
the improvements. Unfortunately, however, the petition could not,
from some unforeseen circumstances, be presented that session.
The project was, for a time, postponed; but an act was obtained in
1806 to carry out the object, and commissioners were appointed for
the purpose. This body consisted of the dean and prebend, the
recorder, 28 members of the corporation, and 24 parochial
commissioners, annually elected, in all 136. This heterogeneous
body continued for about forty years, and after spending over
£300,000, left Norwich the worst paved town in England, and also
left a debt of £17,000, which still remains as a legacy to the city!

Social State of the City in the Eighteenth Century.

Before the end of the 18th century, various improvements were

made, among which may be mentioned, the demolition of the old
gates, the widening and opening of several streets, and the erection
of a new flour mill, worked by steam power, near Black Friars Bridge,
for better supplying the people with flour. Still, large numbers of the
poor appear to have been for a long time in a very destitute
condition. Famines were of frequent occurrence, and riots often
took place on account of the high prices of every kind of food. In
1720, on September 20th, a dangerous riot broke out, and rose to
such a height, as to oblige the sheriffs to call in the aid of the
Artillery Company, at whose approach the rioters instantly
dispersed. Again, in 1740, riots occurred in several parts of the
country, and in most of the towns in Norfolk. The magistrates of this
city called the military to their aid, and six or seven lives were lost
before the rioters could be quelled. Again, in 1766, in consequence
of the great scarcity and advanced price of provisions of every sort,
some dangerous riots broke out in several places. In this city the
poor people collected on September 27th, about noon, and in the
course of that day and the next, committed many outrages by
attacking the houses of bakers, pulling down part of the New Mills,
destroying large quantities of flour, and burning to the ground a
large malthouse outside of Conisford gate. Every lenient measure
was tried by the city magistrates to pacify the poor starving people,
but to no effect. The magistrates therefore were compelled to repel
force by force. On Sunday afternoon they, with the principal
inhabitants, attacked the rioters with such vigour, while they were
demolishing a house on Tombland, that they were dispersed. About
thirty of the ringleaders were taken and tried, and eight of them
were sentenced to death, but only two were executed. They
suffered the extreme penalty on January 10th, 1767.
Strange as it may seem, Norwich was, at this time, in a more
flourishing state as regards trade than it has ever since been
known. Wages were not high, but employment was universal. On
April 25th, 1796, fine flour having risen to 70s. a sack, a mob
attacked several bakers’ shops in the city. The magistrates and
inhabitants assembled and proceeded to the places against which
the attacks of the populace were directed, but the mob did not
disperse till after the riot act had been read and three persons
apprehended. On May 17th, a dreadful affray took place near
Bishop Bridge, between the soldiers of the Northumberland and
Warwickshire regiments of Militia. Several were terribly bruised and
others wounded with bayonets before their officers could part them.
Education was, at this time, at a very low ebb, and the clergy
neglected the poor. Few schools were yet opened for their children,
who grew up in ignorance and vice. Working-men spent their hard-
earned money in drunkenness, or indulged in the most brutal sports,
such as prize-fighting or cock-fighting. They were also demoralised
by bribery and treating at contested elections. In fact, ward
elections were so frequent that the city was kept in a perpetual state
of agitation and turmoil. We can now form no notion of the misery,
poverty, and vice, which these local elections inflicted on the city. It
was often said that a single ward election did more harm than all the
sermons in all the churches and chapels did good. These local
contests at length prevented capital being employed in
manufacturers, and made politics the first object of all the influential
citizens, who, if they were not, strove to become, members of the
old corporation, not from any consideration of public duty, not to
promote the welfare of the citizens, but to serve their own political
or personal interests. There is abundant evidence that the
prosperity of the city, and private friendships, were alike poisoned by
the party spirit, engendered by frequent ward elections; at the same
time the moral character of the whole working population was
greatly deteriorated, and the working classes themselves greatly
depraved.

Nonconformity in the 18th Century.

During this 18th century the Nonconformists became very numerous

and powerful in the city and county. Methodism imparted a healthful
stimulus to the revival of religion. It aroused the church and all
denominations. Besides the very flourishing bodies of Wesleyans
and Baptists, the Independents made great progress. Within two
centuries, in place of one, several chapels arose; and throughout all
England, few towns exhibited a greater increase of Nonconformists
than Norwich. We have already given an account of their rise and
progress in the 17th century, but we have not yet noticed the
Unitarians. A history of the Octagon chapel in Norwich, by Mr. John
Taylor, formerly of this city, and continued by his son, Mr. Edward
Taylor, contains a full account of the rise and progress of the
Unitarians here. They were at first called Presbyterians, but that
name was inappropriate, as they never had the Presbyterian polity
nor doctrine. Mr. John Taylor says, the first Presbyterian chapel was
built in 1687, on a piece of ground, formerly part of the great garden
or orchard, “sometime belonging to the prior and convent of the late
friars’ preachers,” of whose deserted walls the Dissenters took
possession. The building was so constructed that it might be
converted into dwelling houses in case their preachers were
compelled to abandon it.
Blomefield, in his History of the City, says:—

“In 1687, the Presbyterians built a meeting house from the

ground, over against the Black Boys; and at the same time the
Independents repaired a house in St. Edmund’s formerly a brew
house.”

After the passing of the Toleration Act, in 1689, this meeting house,
which, had not been long finished, was duly licensed. Dr. Collinges,
a learned Presbyterian minister, was the first pastor appointed to
preach by the congregation. He had a considerable hand in the
“Annotations to the Bible,” which were begun and carried on by Mr.
Matthew Poole, and which go under his name.
Dr. Collinges died in January, 1690, and was probably succeeded
soon after by Mr. Josiah Chorley, who was not a native of Norwich,
but came from Lancashire. He officiated about thirty years, and was
succeeded by the Rev. Peter Finch, a highly esteemed preacher for
many years. After he died his funeral sermon was preached by Mr.
Taylor, who said:—

“Surely the character of Mr. Finch, drawn out so even and clear
without any remarkable spot or flaw, through the long course of
sixty-three years in this city, must be deserving of remembrance
and imitation, since it must be the result of a steady integrity
and solid wisdom.”

The Rev. Mr. Finch was one of the first pupils who entered into the
first dissenting academy, erected after the Reformation, by the Rev.
Mr. Frankland; and he survived almost all the 300 gentlemen who, in
the space of thirty years, were educated in that academy. He died
October 6th, 1754, on his 93rd birthday, and was buried in St.
Peter’s Church, in this city. His descendents were residents here till
1847. His son was many years clerk of the peace for the county of
Norfolk.
Mr. John Brooke was invited to take his place towards the end of the
year 1718. This minister was born in or near Yarmouth, where some
of his descendants have generally resided. He resigned in 1733, and
removed to York, where he died. Dr. John Taylor was elected to the
vacant office in 1733, and continued till 1757, when he resigned. He
was the author of many works of a religious character. In 1753 the
old chapel was pulled down, and a subscription was raised of nearly
£4000 for a new one. The first stone of the new building was laid
on February 25th, 1754, by Dr. Taylor; and within three years the
present elegant chapel was completed at a cost of £5174.
Mr. Samuel Bourn, son of Mr. Bourn of Birmingham, was ordained
co-pastor with Dr. John Taylor, and he published volumes of sermons
which established his reputation in that kind of composition. He
resigned in 1775, and retired to a village near Norwich. Several
gentlemen, who afterwards attained considerable eminence in
science, were brought up under Mr. Bourn’s ministry, viz., Sir James
Edward Smith, so long president of the Linnean Society; Mr. Robert
Woodhouse, the eminent mathematician and professor of astronomy
at Cambridge; and Dr. Edward Maltby, afterwards bishop of
Durham. Mr. Bourn removed to Norwich not many months before
his death, and died in the 83rd year of his age; he was interred in
the burying ground of the Octagon Chapel. Mr. Bourn was
succeeded by the Rev. John Hoyle, who was minister for seventeen
years. He died in the 51st year of his age, on November 29th, 1775,
and was interred in the Octagon burying ground.
On December 15th, 1776, Mr. Alderson was chosen minister, and
soon afterwards Mr. George Cadogan Morgan became co-pastor. He
had been educated under the inspection of his uncle, the celebrated
Dr. Richard Price, so that great expectations were formed of his
abilities, and the congregation were not disappointed. He soon,
however, resigned and went to Yarmouth; and in 1755, Dr. William
Enfield was invited to become co-pastor with Mr. Alderson, and he
accepted the office. In 1786, Mr. Alderson resigned; and in 1787
was succeeded by Mr. P. Houghton.
In 1784, Mr. P. M. Martineau projected the establishment of the
Public Library at Norwich, in which he was cordially seconded by Dr.
Enfield, who was one of the earliest presidents of an institution,
which for the extent and variety of its catalogue surpasses most
provincial libraries. In the early periods of the first French
Revolution, a periodical work was established by the liberal party in
Norwich, entitled “The Cabinet;” to which the principal contributors
were Mr. John Pitchford, Mr. Wm. Youngman, Mr. Norgate, Mr. C.
Marsh (afterwards M.P. for Retford), Mrs. Opie (then Miss Alderson),
Mr. John Taylor, and Dr. Enfield. After publishing many learned
works, Dr. Enfield died in the 57th year of his age, on November 3rd,
1797. After his death, three volumes of his sermons were published
by subscription; and among the subscribers were persons of almost
every sect in Norwich, from the cathedral prebendary to the
independent minister. More than twenty beneficed clergymen’s
names appear in the list, and it is very well known that Dr. Enfield’s
sermons have been heard from many pulpits of the established
church. Professor Taylor, late of Gresham college, thus wrote in a
supplementary memoir:—

“With his dissenting brethren Dr. Enfield was always on the best
terms, especially with Mr. Newton and Mr. Kinghorn, the
ministers of the Independent and Baptist congregations. The
Presbyterian congregation, comprising many individuals of
station and influence in the city, took the lead in every
movement of the dissenting body, who never appeared in a
more united and honourable position than when Dr. Enfield was
their acknowledged head. The state of society during his
residence in Norwich, was eminently suited to his habits and
tastes. Parr, Peel, Walker, Howes, and Smyth were his
 contemporaries. Parr was the head master of the grammar
school, Potter was a prebendary of the Cathedral, and Porson
was occasional resident at the house of his brother-in-law, Mr.
Hawes of Coltishall, a village a few miles from Norwich. Dr.
Enfield was a welcome visitor at the bishop’s palace; for though
Dr. Bagot had no political or religious sympathy with the
minister of the Presbyterian congregation, he knew how to
estimate his talents, his manners, and his admirable
conversational powers. Among the residents in Norwich at this
time, with whom Dr. Enfield associated, were Dr. Sayers, Mr.
William Taylor, Mr. Hudson Gurney (afterwards M.P. for Newport
and a vice-president of the Society of Antiquaries), Dr. Rigby, Dr.
Lubbock, Sir James Edward Smith, the Rev. John Walker (an
accomplished scholar and one of the minor canons of the
Cathedral), Mrs. Opie (then Miss Alderson), Mr. Bruckner, the
minister of the Dutch and French protestant congregations at
Norwich, and others, who though unknown to the world as
authors, were yet worthy associates in such a society.”

Dr. Enfield’s estimate of the character of society at Norwich, is thus

expressed in a letter from Liverpool to Professor Taylor’s father:—

“You will easily imagine the pleasure I feel in enjoying the

society of my old friends here, especially that of Mr. Roscoe and
Dr. Currie; but with these and a few other exceptions, I find
more congenial associates at Norwich. For a man of literary
tastes and pursuits, I can truly say that I know of no town
which offers so eligible a residence.”

Mr. Roscoe and Dr. Currie, referred to above, were then in high
reputation in Liverpool.
The altered state of society in Norwich, about the end of the 18th
century is thus depicted in a paper in the Monthly Magazine for
March, 1808, under the title of “Fanaticism—a Vision,” which was
generally attributed to the pen of Sir James Edward Smith:—
“You know the flourishing and happy state of this ancient city in
the early part of your life, and particularly how peaceably and
even harmoniously its inhabitants lived together on the score of
religion. Christians of various denominations had each their
churches, their chapels, or their meeting houses, and in the
common intercourse of life all conducted themselves as
brethren. The interests of humanity would even frequently
bring them together on particular occasions to pay their
devotions in the same temple. The bishop (Bathurst) treated as
his children all who, though they disowned his spiritual
authority, obeyed his Divine Master; while the Presbyterian, the
Independent, the Catholic, and the Quaker, partook of his
hospitality and repaid his benevolence with gratitude and
respect. This state of society, worthy of real Christians, was
broken up by those who wore that character only as a mask. A
set of men, interested in promoting dissensions, by which villany
and rapacity might profit, and in decrying those genuine fruits
of religion, that salutary faith and pure morals, which by
comparison shamed their own characters, after long in vain
attempting to exalt blind belief in general, and their particular
dogmas, in preference to a useful and virtuous life, but too
successfully obtained their end. On all the great truths of
revealed religion, honest men could never be long at variance.
On disputable points they had learned a salutary forbearance,
which enabled them, while they thought for themselves, to let
others do the same. The only resources of those who wish to
stir up religious animosity, is to bring forward something that no
one can determine. The less mankind understand a subject, the
more warmly do they debate and strive to enforce the belief of
it.”

Eminent Citizens of the 18th Century.

Merchants and Manufacturers.

Among the eminent citizens of this century may be first mentioned
the chief merchants and manufacturers, who were very intelligent,
wealthy, and enterprising. They were also benevolent, and the
founders of various charitable institutions. Many of them were
Nonconformists, and active supporters of their chapels, while they
carried on a great foreign trade. The correspondence which they
had begun on the continent they extended in every direction. By
sending their sons to be educated in Germany, Italy, and Spain, they
cultivated a more familiar connection with those countries. Their
travellers also were acquainted with various languages, and went all
over Europe, exhibiting their pattern cards in every town on the
continent. Norwich could then boast of rich, energetic, enterprising,
and intelligent men, who made the city what it was in their day.
Lest their very names should be forgotten, we shall place them in
this record. Amongst the manufacturers were
Messrs. Robert and John Harvey,
Messrs. Starling Day and Son,
Messrs. Watson, Firth, and Co.,
Messrs. John Barnard and Angier,
Messrs. Thomas Paul and Flindt,
Messrs. J. Tuthill and Sons,
Messrs. William Barnard and Sons,
Messrs. Edward Marsh and Son,
Messrs. Bream and King,
Messrs. Martin and Williment,
Messrs. Peter Colombine and Son,
Messrs. James Buttivant and William White,
Messrs. W. and W. Taylor,
Messrs. J. Scott and Sons,
Messrs. E. Gurney and Ellington,
Messrs. Patteson and Iselin,
Messrs. Booth and Theobald,
Messrs. George Maltby and Son,
Messrs. William and Robert Herring,
Messrs. Worth and Carter,
Messrs. Bacon and Marshall,
Messrs. Ives and Robberds,
Messrs. J. and J. Ives, Son, and Baseley,
Mr. Robert Partridge,
Mr. Bartholomew Sewell,
Mr. John Robinson,
Mr. Robert Wright,
Mr. John Wright,
Mr. Robert Tillyard,
Mr. Daniel Fromantiel,
Mr. J. C. Hampp,
Mr. John Herring,
Mr. Joseph Cliver, Jun.,
Mr. Oxley,
and others, all of whom have passed away.
Mr. John Kirkpatrick.

Mr. John Kirkpatrick, a linen merchant, who lived in St. Andrew’s,

was a learned antiquarian of this period, to whom the city is greatly
indebted for his researches and documents respecting the antiquities
of Norwich, but only fragments have been published. The late Mr.
Hudson Gurney obtained possession of most of his manuscripts, and
published his account of the “Religious Orders in Norwich,” in 1845.
This work was compiled from a manuscript quarto volume of 258
pages, in the handwriting of the author. Mr. Dawson Turner, the
editor, says, in the preface:—

“Mr. Kirkpatrick’s father was a native of the village of Closeburn,

in Dumfriesshire, a fact recorded by his son in his will, and
further proved by the arms on his tomb (in St. Helen’s church)
which are those of the baronet’s family of Kirkpatrick, of
Closeburn. From Scotland he removed to Norwich, where he
resided in the parish of St. Stephen. His son John was
apprenticed in that of St. Clement, and subsequently established
himself in business as a linen merchant, in St. Andrew’s, in
premises opposite Bridewell Alley. He was there in partnership
with Mr. John Custance, who was mayor in 1726, and was the
founder of the family of that name at Weston. In the year of his
partner’s mayoralty, Mr. Kirkpatrick was appointed treasurer to
the Great Hospital, in St. Helen’s, an office which his premature
decease allowed him to occupy only for two years. He married
the youngest daughter of Mr. John Harvey, great-grandfather of
the late Lieut.-Colonel Harvey, of Thorpe Lodge, where his
portrait was preserved during the lifetime of that gentleman. It
has since been engraved in the very interesting series of
portraits of the more eminent inhabitants of Norfolk, of whom
no likenesses have yet appeared, a work now in course of
publication, under the superintendence of Mr. Ewing. With
such, Kirkpatrick is deservedly associated. He died childless. Of
 his family, nothing more is known than that he had a brother of
the name of Thomas, who is mentioned by Blomefield as being
chamberlain of Norwich at the time he wrote. The account
books of the corporation contain several entries in reference to
both the one and the other, but not of sufficient interest to
warrant the quoting of them at length. Of the latter, they shew
that he was elected chamberlain with a salary of thirty pounds
per annum, in the room of Matthew King, in 1732; that in the
same year, the freedom of the city was conferred upon him; and
that twelve years subsequently he was removed from his office,
by reason of irregularity of his accounts. To the antiquary, their
testimony is invariably honourable; the most frequent notices
being, votes of money for the service he had rendered in
adjusting the different accounts of the city.”

Mr. Dawson Turner further states:—

“Mr. Kirkpatrick was one of the most able, laborious, learned,

and useful antiquaries whom the county has produced. He was
especially an indefatigable searcher into local antiquities, and
had his life been spared to the term allotted by the holy
Psalmist to man, it were impossible to say how much of what is
now irretrievably lost to us might have been rescued from
oblivion. He had accumulated copious materials, but his early
death prevented him from digesting and publishing them.
Better far had he contented himself with amassing less, and
turning what he had got to account; a lesson hard to learn, but
most important to be borne in mind and acted upon. As it was,
he was obliged to leave the fulfilment of his task to others;
taking all possible care for the safety of his collections, and not
doubting that those who came after him, seeing what was
prepared for their hands, would cheerfully undertake the office,
perhaps with a praiseworthy zeal for communicating
information, perhaps with the not less natural desire of building
their own fame upon the labours of their predecessors. But in
his expectations he was sadly mistaken, and has but furnished
 an additional proof how difficult it is for any one to enter
completely into the objects and ideas of another, and
consequently how imperative it is upon all, ourselves to finish
the web we have begun, if we wish to see it come perfect and
uniform from the loom.”

Blomefield, who was a contemporary, acknowledges his great

obligations to the learned Norwich antiquary, and recorded the death
of his friend and his being buried in St. Helen’s Church, Norwich.
The tomb, a black marble monument, by the steps of the altar, bears
the following arms and inscription:—

“Argent, a saltier and on a chief,

Azure, three woolpacks of the field,
Crest, a hand holding a dagger proper,
Motto—I make sure.
“Here resteth in hope of a joyful resurrection, the body of John
Kirkpatrick of this city, Merchant, and Treasurer to this Hospital.
He was a man of sound judgment, good understanding and
extensive knowledge; industrious in his business, and
indefatigable in that of the Corporation in which he was
constantly employed. He died, very much lamented by all that
knew him, on the 20th day of August, in the year of our Lord,
1728, aged 42.”

The Rev. F. Blomefield.

The Rev. Francis Blomefield, rector of Fersfield, lived some time in

this city, compiling his history of Norwich, which he brought down to
the year 1742. He was born at Fersfield, July 23rd, 1705. He was
installed rector of that parish in 1729, when he almost immediately
commenced collecting materials for a history of his native county,
but his work is more a topographical survey than a history. He did
not live to complete it, having caught the small-pox when in London,
of which he died, in the 46th year of his age, on January 15th,
1751. He began printing his great work in 1736. In 1769 it was
continued (but not completed) in five folio volumes by the Rev.
Charles Parker, M.A., rector of Oxburgh.
William Anderson, F.R.S., came to Norwich as an excise officer, and
his great talents introduced him to the most scientific characters of
this city. He obtained the situation of clerk to the New Mills, in
Heigham, and was a considerable contributor to Mr. Baker’s works on
the Microscope. Many of his papers on Natural History are published
in the transactions of the Royal Society. He died in 1767, and was
buried in Heigham churchyard.
Anna Letitia Barbauld, sister of Dr. Aikin, of Yarmouth, resided at
Norwich. She was the authoress of “Evenings at Home,” and other
valuable works for children, and died in 1825.
Peter Barlow, the celebrated mathematician, and author of many of
the articles in Rees’ Encyclopædia, and the Encyclopædia
Metropolitana, was the son of a warper of this city. He was born
October, 1766, in the parish of St. Simon and Jude.
Sir William Beechey, the eminent painter, resided in this city in the
early part of his life, and executed several of the paintings in St.
Andrew’s Hall, particularly the celebrated portrait of Lord Nelson. He
was knighted by George III., and appointed portrait painter to his
majesty.
Hancock Blythe, schoolmaster, mathematician, and teacher of
languages, resided in Timberhill, and was the author of several small
works on astronomy. He died in 1795, aged 73 years.
John Brand, B.A., was a native of this city. His father was a saddler
in London Lane. Young Brand, having a turn for study, went for
some years to the continent, where he acquired the languages and
customs of the people so strongly, that on his return to England he
received the soubriquêt of Abbè Brand. In 1744 he was reader at
St. Peter’s Mancroft. He was the author of several articles in the
British Critic. He was rector of St. George’s, Southwark, and of
Wickham Skeith, in Suffolk. He died in February, 1809.
Henry Cooper, barrister at law, was born in the parish of St. Peter’s
Mancroft. He was sent to sea in the early part of his life, but was
afterwards called to the bar, and was made attorney general of the
Bermudas. After a brilliant career, in which he rapidly became one
of the leaders of the Norfolk circuit, he died, after being twelve years
at the bar, in 1825.
Mr. Reuben Deave was a large manufacturer in this city, who, in
December, 1769, became the fortunate possessor of a prize in a
lottery worth £20,000. The number was 42,903. It came into his
possession in the following singular manner. His foreman, who was
in a confidential position, had bought two tickets in a lottery, and
after some time thought he had speculated too far, and told his
employer that he feared he had done a very foolish thing. Mr.
Deave, being informed of the circumstance, thought so too, but
offered to buy one of the tickets. His foreman took them out of his
pocket and gave Mr. Deave his choice. Mr. Deave, however, said he
would make no choice, and bought the one offered to him. Shortly
afterwards the lottery was drawn, and this ticket proved to be a
fortunate number for £20,000, while the other was a blank. Mr.
Deave, who had paid for the ticket, gave his foreman a cheque for
£500, but the poor man was so vexed at losing the prize that he
hung himself on the next day. Mr. Deave was much grieved at this,
and often said afterwards that the prize never did him any good, for
he gave a power of attorney to a man to draw the money in London,
and that man bolted with it, and was never heard of afterwards.
William Enfield, LL.D. an eminent literary character, was for many
years the minister at the Octagon Chapel here. He was much
beloved by his congregation, and died November 2nd, 1797, aged
57, and was buried in the chapel, where there is a monument to his
memory.
Sir John Fenn, the editor of the “Paston Letters,” was born here in
1739; on presenting the first two volumes of these letters to George
III. in 1787, he was knighted. He died October 14th, 1796.
John Fransham, the Norwich Polytheist, a very eccentric character,
was born in St. George’s Colegate. He was an excellent
mathematician, and was a great admirer of the ancient writers on
this science. He frequently took rapid solitary walks, with a broad
brimmed hat slouched over his eyes, and a plaid on his shoulders,
and was supposed to sleep often on Mousehold Heath. He died on
February 1st, 1810. His biography was written by his pupil, Mr.
Saint.
Thomas Hall, Esq., a merchant, lived in the early part of this period.
He founded a monthly sacramental lecture, left several legacies to
the charities, and £100 for a gold chain to be worn by the Mayor of
Norwich, and which is now worn by the Deputy Mayor. He died on
December 17th, 1715, and was buried with great funeral pomp at
St. George’s Colegate. A portrait of this pious and liberal benefactor
was presented by John and Edward Taylor, Esqs., to the corporation,
and placed in the council chamber, May, 1821.
John Hobart, Earl of Buckinghamshire, sat as member of parliament
for this city from 1747 to 1756, when he succeeded to the peerage.
He was a liberal benefactor to the city. He was born August 17th,
1723, and died September 3rd, 1793.
James Hooke, a celebrated musician, author of more than 2400
songs, 140 complete works or operas, one oratorio, and many odes,
anthems, &c., was born in this city. At the early age of four years he
was capable of playing many pieces, and at six he performed in
public. He died in 1813, leaving two sons by his first wife. One of
them was Dr. James Hooke, Dean of Worcester, who died in 1828.
The other was the celebrated author of “Sayings and Doings.”
David Kinnebrook, an eminent mathematician, was born here. He
was master of one of the charity schools for forty years, and never
absented himself a single day until his last illness. He died March
23rd, 1810, aged 72.
John Lens, Esq., M.A., ancient sergeant at law, is believed to have
been born in the parish of St. Andrew’s, and was educated here. In
1781, he was called to the bar. He first practised in the Courts of
King’s Bench, but being made a sergeant, confined himself chiefly to
the common pleas. He was afterwards made King’s and next King’s
Ancient Sergeant. On more than one occasion he declined the offer
of the bench. He died August 6th, 1825, in his 69th year.
Richard Lubbock, M.D., was born here in 1759, and was educated at
the Free Grammar School. He obtained his degree at Edinburgh in
1784. On his return to Norwich he practised with great success. He
died September 1st, 1808, and was buried at Earlham church.
The Right Rev. Jacob Mountain, D.D., was the first protestant bishop
in the Canadas. He was born in the parish of St. Andrew. He
presided over the church in the two Canadas for thirty-two years,
and died June 16th, 1825, in the seventy-fifth year of his age.
Samuel Parr, LL.D., was master of the Free Grammar School from
1778 to 1792, when he resigned on being presented to the rectory
of Buckden, in Lincolnshire.
Edward Rigby, M.D., was born at Chawbent, in Lancashire,
December 9th, 1749. He was under the tuition of Dr. Priestley until
he was fourteen, when he was apprenticed to Mr. David Martineau of
this city. In 1805 he was elected mayor, and died Oct. 27th, 1822.
In August, 1818, the corporation voted him and his lady a piece of
plate of the value of twenty-five guineas, as a memento of the
memorable birth of their four children at one time, and the event
was recorded in the city books. Two of the children lived to be
nearly twelve weeks old, and the other two not quite seven weeks.
William Saint, one of the mathematical masters of the Royal Military
Academy, at Woolwich, was a native of St. Mary’s Coslany. He wrote
the “Life of Fransham,” and was a contributor to the “Lady’s Diary.”
He died July 9th, 1819.
George Sandby, D.D., chancellor of the diocese of Norwich,
personally presided in the consistorial court of the Lord Bishop of
Norwich for nearly thirty years, during the whole of which time no
decree of his was reversed by a superior court. He died March 17th,
1807, aged ninety-one.
William Say, an eminent mezzotinto engraver, was born at Lakenham
in 1768.
Frank Sayers, M.D., an eminent physician and literary character, who
for many years resided in this city, was born in London, March 3rd,
1763. He was the author of “Dramatic Sketches of the Ancient
Northern Mythology,” “Poems,” “Disquisitious, Metaphysical and
Literary,” “Nugæ Poeticæ,” and “Miscellanies, Antiquarian and
Historical.” He died August 16th, 1817, and a mural monument is
erected to his memory in the Cathedral, with a Latin inscription by
the Rev. F. Howes. His works were collected and edited by the late
William Taylor of this city.
Sir James Edward Smith, M.D., F.R.S., president of the Linnæan
Society, London, and of the Norwich Museum, and member of
several foreign academies, was born in St. Peter’s Mancroft,
December 2nd, 1759. He received his education here, and
graduated as a physician at Leyden, in 1786. He assisted materially
in the establishment of the Linnæan Society, in 1788, of which he
was the first president, and he continued to preside over the society
until his death, March 15th, 1828. He was the author of several
admirable botanical works.
William Stevenson, F.S.A., who was for many years proprietor of the
“Norfolk Chronicle,” and who edited a new edition of “Bentham’s
History of Ely Cathedral,” was born at East Retford, in 1750, and died
at his house in Surrey Street in this city, May 13th, 1821, aged
seventy-one. He was, in the early part of his life, an artist of no
mean pretension; and was esteemed an antiquarian and
numismatist of considerable knowledge and research.
John Taylor, D.D., was a native of Lancaster. He came to Norwich in
1733, and was a minister to the Presbyterian dissenters in 1757. He
was the author of several theological works, and died at Warrington,
March 5th, 1761, aged sixty-six.
William Taylor, a celebrated German scholar, and a very eccentric
character, author of an “Historical Survey of German Poetry,” and a
translator of several German works, was born in this city, and
resided for many years in Upper King Street. He died in 1836, aged
sixty-nine.
Edward Baron Thurlow was born at Bracon Ash, in this county. He
received the rudiments of his education at the Free Grammar School
here. He rose successively to be appointed solicitor general,
attorney general, master of the rolls, and lord high chancellor of
Great Britain, and was created Lord Thurlow in 1778. In 1793 he
resigned the seals. He died at Brighton, September 12th, 1806.
William Wilkins, sen., architect, was born in the parish of St.
Benedict, about the year 1744 or 1747. He received but a limited
education, but possessed an admirable taste for design, and his
plans and drawings were very beautiful. He was the author of a
clever essay in Vol. xii. of the “Archæologia,” on the Venta Icenorum.
William Wilkins, M.A., son of the above, was born in St. Giles’
parish. He was educated at the Free Grammar School here. He was
employed in the erection of several public buildings in London, and
numerous private mansions. His literary labours were confined to
the subject of architecture, and his “Magna Græcia” is considered to
be an excellent work.
William Windham. This eminent statesman represented the city in
several parliaments. He was born in London in 1750, and first sat
for Norwich in 1780. In 1783 he was appointed secretary to the lord
lieutenant of Ireland, and made his first speech in parliament in
1785. He died in 1806.
Sir Benjamin Wrench, an eminent physician, who practised here for
sixty years, lived in St. Andrew’s. His house occupied the site of the
present Corn Exchange. He was lord of the manor of Little Melton in
Blomefield’s time.

Norwich in the Nineteenth Century.

We have now arrived at the present age of political progress, and

material prosperity; the age of inventions, railways, newspapers, and
telegraphs; the age of expansion and general intelligence. George
III., George IV., and William IV., have reigned in this century, and
have been succeeded by our beloved Queen Victoria. Under her
benign sway the old semi-barbarous state of society has passed
away like a dream, and we live in a new social era, the result of the
progress of education, of the march of improvement, and of the
spread of true religion.
As it has been often stated by local historians that Norwich formerly
contained a very large population, and as this statement is very
generally believed, we may here correct the mistake by giving the
returns, which show a very gradual, and very slow increase from the
earliest period to the present time. The parochial returns show that
in 1693 the population was only 28,881; in 1752 it had increased to
36,169; and in 1786 to 40,051. This was the greatest number up to
the end of the last century. In 1801 it was 36,832, not including
6,000 recruits for the army, navy, and militia; making the total
number 42,832. This indicates a very slow increase of population.
The following are the returns for the present century: 1801, 36,832;
1811, 37,256; 1821, 50,288; 1831, 61,116; 1841, 62,294; 1851,
68,713; 1861, 74,414, being an increase of about 500 yearly.
Norwich in 1752 contained only 7131 houses, and in 1801 8763, of
which 1747 were returned as empty. In 1831 the number was
14,201, of which 13,132 were inhabited. Now the number is over
21,000, and the rateable value is £178,882.
We must now leave the stately march of history for a more broken
and interrupted step. There is some difficulty in detailing the events
of this period, for every reader is more or less acquainted with it,
and has viewed it in relation to his own interests and prejudices.
The records of facts are so voluminous, that every reader may think
that there is something omitted, or misrepresented, or exaggerated.
It is impossible, however, to mention every local occurrence which
some one may think important, every accident, or fire, or crime, or
every grand concert or entertainment. We have to deal with events
more connected with general history; and we shall first state the
more remarkable occurrences of a civil or municipal character,
reserving political matters for a subsequent chapter. But in order to
render our narrative of local events, and especially local elections,
more intelligible, it will be necessary to give a brief account of the
old corporation, whose proceedings occupy so large a part of our
records.

NORWICH CORPORATION.

This body claims a prescriptive origin. Certain privileges were

granted to the city by the charters of different sovereigns, the first
being that of Henry I., which was annulled and again renewed by
Stephen. The particular privileges conceded by it cannot now be
ascertained. The next charter is that of the 5th Henry II., but this is
only confirmatory of former grants, and the original is still preserved
in the Guildhall. One granted by Richard I. contains some estimable
clauses. The most prominent are, that no citizen shall be forced to
answer any plea or action in any but the city courts, except for those
concerning possessions out of the city; that the citizens should have
acquittance of murder, which is equivalent to granting them a
coroner; that they should not be forced to duel, that is, should be
exempt from the general law which was then in force, of deciding
causes by single combat; that they should be free from toll
throughout all England; and that they should have other liberties, all
highly important, and no doubt justly appreciated by the citizens of
that period. King John’s charter is similar to the preceding, and that
of Henry II., with the addition that all persons living in the city, and
participating in the liberties of the citizens, shall be talliated or taxed,
and pay as the aforesaid citizens of Norwich do, when tollages and
aid shall be laid upon them. It is probable that the principal
authority was invested in bailiffs, instead of a provost, in 1223, as
there is no evidence of the existence of such officers before that
time.
Two deeds of Henry III., and several of succeeding kings, all either
confirmed or enlarged the privileges granted to the city; but our
attention is most attracted by the concessions of Henry IV., which
established the constitution of a mayor, sheriffs, &c. The original
charter is lost, but those of his son and more modern princes have
sufficiently preserved the spirit of it. The charter of Henry V. made
the extensive territory within the corporation limits a county of itself,
excepting only the castle, which belonged to Norfolk. This territory
was, by the boundary act, included for the purposes of
representation. Twenty-five charters, the latest by James II., are
known to have been granted, and probably others existed and have
been lost. When the innovations, made in old establishments during
the Commonwealth, were gradually reformed, the citizens petitioned
for a renewal of their rights. The charter of 15th Charles II. was
obtained, and under it the city was governed till the passing of the
Municipal Reform Act. Most of the old charters were granted in
consideration for sums of money given or lent to kings to enable
them to carry on wars. Many of the charters were more injurious
than beneficial to the city, as they created monopolies of one kind or
other, or gave powers to the old corporation which were frequently
abused. Those who wish to study those old documents more
minutely may find them in Blomefield’s history.
The old corporation was more ornamental than useful to the city for
400 years. Under it the sanitary state of the city was so bad, the
drainage of the city so defective, and the supply of water so
insufficient, that plagues and pestilences, which carried off
thousands of the citizens, were of frequent occurrence. Ward
elections were so often contested, that bribery, treating, and
intimidation, were quite common, and the corruption of the freemen
and lower classes was universal. Physically and morally the city was
for centuries in the worst possible condition. The ward elections
were carried on with a spirit which was surpassed in no other place.
They were considered as trials of strength between different parties;
and if they happened at a period when a general election was
anticipated, an enormous sum of money was spent in treating and
bribery. Indeed, it has been asserted on good authority that no less
a sum than £16,000 was wasted in the contest for a single ward in
1818! The city was divided into four great wards, each of which was
subdivided into three small wards. The mayor was elected by the
freemen on May 1st, and sworn into his office on the Guild day,
which was always the Tuesday before Midsummer day. He was
chosen from the aldermen, and afterwards he was a magistrate for
life. One of the sheriffs was chosen by the court of aldermen, the
other by the freemen on the last Tuesday in August. The twenty-
four aldermen were chosen for the twelve smaller wards, two for
each ward, whose office was to keep the peace in their several
divisions. When anyone of them died, the freemen of that great
ward in which the lesser ward was included, for which he was to
serve, elected another in his place within five days. The common
councilmen were elected by the freemen dwelling in each of the four
great wards separately; for Conisford great ward on the Monday;
Mancroft on the Tuesday; Wymer on the Wednesday; and the
Northern ward on the Thursday in Passion week, thence called
“cleansing” week. They chose a speaker yearly, who was called
speaker of the commons. The old freemen therefore formed the
whole of the local constituency for municipal purposes.
Memoirs are often the best sources of information respecting public
matters, as they let us behind the scenes and show us what the
actors really thought and did. A good memoir of the late Professor
Taylor, which appeared in the Norfolk News, of March 28th and April
4th, 1863, contained the following, “So far back as 1808 we find Mr.
Taylor recording that he was ‘elected a common councilman for the
fourth time.’” He also states that the contest for nominees in the
Long ward was “the severest ever remembered.” Few people now-a-
days could realize the import of those few words. Few understand
how much was implied by the once common phrase “a battle for the
Long ward.” The combatants would have scorned such mealy-
mouthed appellations, as “conservative” and “liberal,” or indeed any
name but that of the colors under which they fought. They were
“blue-and-whites,” or “orange-and-purples;” the former being what
would now be called the “liberal,” and the latter the “conservative,”
party. To be a blue-and-white or an orange-and-purple, was to be
an angel or a devil, as the case might be; the angels being of course
those of your own side, to whichever you belonged. Great was the
potency of colors: though not supposed to be worn at municipal
elections, they were a rallying cry, and they were always at hand to
be flouted, like a red rag at a turkey, in the face of the enemy. Even
housemaids and children concealed them about their persons, in
readiness to show them slyly from some window, both to encourage
their friends and exasperate their enemies, whenever a procession
passed. Great were the preparations for the contest. A sort of civic
press-gang prowled the streets by night for the purpose of “cooping
chickens,” which, being done into English, means carrying men off
by force, and keeping them drunk and in confinement, so that if they
could not be got to vote “for” it would be impossible for them to
vote “against.” If they could not be safely secured in the city, they
were “cribbed, cabined, and confined” in wherries on the river, or the
broads, or even taken to Yarmouth and carried out to sea. When
the day of battle came, great was the shouting, the drinking, the
betting, the bribing, and the fighting, till the longest purse contrived
to win the day. Of course, the dirty work was done by dirty men.
But leading men on both sides were so used to see this sort of thing,
that they considered it only as a necessary part and parcel of an
election. It was regarded rather as a limb which could not be safely
severed from the body, than as a shabby coat which disgraced the
wearer. Besides, palliating rhetoric was not absent. Better do a little
evil than surrender a cause essential to the welfare of the state!
“What we did,” we honest orange-and-purples, or we pure blue-and-
whites, “was done in mere self-defence.”
 Leading Events in the Nineteenth Century.

1801. January 1st, 1801, being the first day of the nineteenth
century, and the day on which the Union of Great Britain and Ireland
took place, the 13th Regiment of Light Dragoons dismounted, and
the Militia fired a feu de joie in the Market Place.
January 3rd. The old Theatre (built in 1757) was re-opened after
extensive improvements. The alterations were executed after the
designs of William Wilkins, Esq., the patentee. This theatre was
formerly a good school for young actors, and many promising
performers have first appeared on these boards. Of late, operatic
performances appear to be most in favour with the gentry.
February 24th. Charles Harvey, Esq., the steward, was unanimously
elected Recorder of Norwich, vice Henry Partridge, Esq., resigned.
April 4th. Mrs. Lloyd, widow of the Rev. Dean Lloyd, died at
Cambridge, aged 79. This lady painted the Transfiguration, and
other figures in the eastern windows of the Cathedral.
In April, the ward elections were the causes of great contention. In
consequence of objections being made to the elections of two
nominees of the Wymer ward, and three of the Northern ward, on
the ground of their being ineligible under the corporation act, having
omitted to receive the sacrament within a year previous to the
election of the common council, the mayor did not make the returns
till several days after the usual time. At a court held April 4th, after
the objections had been fully heard by counsel, the recorder (Mr.
Harvey) declared that the persons objected to who had the majority
of votes, having omitted to come into court according to summons,
were not duly elected, but as no regular notice had been given
previous to the election, the candidates in the minority could not be
returned. A new election for the above wards accordingly took place
on May 25th and 26th.
June 16th. Jeremiah Ives, Esq., of Catton, was elected mayor a
second time. There was no guild feast this year at St. Andrew’s Hall.
June 25th. An awful fire, which lasted two hours, broke out on the
roof of the Cathedral, and in less than an hour, 45 feet of the leaded
roof, towards the western end of the nave, were consumed. Some
plumbers had been at work repairing the roof, and set fire to it
either accidentally or intentionally. The damage was about £500.
The Lord Bishop (Dr. Sutton) was present, and distributed
refreshment to the soldiers and people who assisted in arresting the
progress of the conflagration.

1802. Peace was proclaimed throughout the city on May the 4th, in
due form; and the mayor and corporation went in procession from
the hall through the principal streets. There was a general
illumination at night. At a quarterly assembly of the council, a
congratulatory address to his majesty on the restoration of peace,
was voted unanimously.
On May 21st, the city address was presented to the king, at the
levee at St. James’ Palace, by Jeremiah Ives, Esq., Junr., the mayor,
and Sir Roger Kerrison.
On May 29th, a county meeting was held, when a similar address
was adopted.
October 4th to 7th. A grand musical festival was held in Norwich,
under the direction of Messrs. Beckwith and Sharp of this city, and
Mr. Ashley of London. Mrs. Billington, Mr. Bartleman, and Mr.
Braham, were the principal performers.
October 21st. There was a severe contest for the election of an
alderman in the great northern ward, in the room of Francis
Colombine, Esq., resigned. The numbers were—for E. Rigby, Esq.,
261; Jonathan Davey, Esq., 259.

1803. February 8th. At a full meeting held at the Guildhall, a

committee was appointed to prepare a bill to be laid before a future
meeting, for better paving, lighting, watching, and cleansing the
city. A petition to the house of commons for leave to bring in a bill,
was afterwards presented, but it was strongly opposed as not being
then expedient. An act was, however, ultimately carried.
March 7th. At a special assembly of the corporation, an address of
congratulation was adopted, to be presented to his majesty, on the
providential discovery of the late traitorous conspiracy against his
royal person and government, entered into by Colonel Despard and
six other persons, who were executed on the top of the New Surrey
prison, in Horsemonger Lane. The high sheriff and grand jury of
Norfolk, at Thetford, also voted an address of congratulation to the
king, and a similar address was adopted at a county meeting held at
the Shirehall.
March 21st. The portrait of Captain John Harvey, of the Norwich
Light Horse volunteers, painted by Mr. Opie, at the request of the
troop, was placed in St. Andrew’s Hall.
April 27th. A public dispensary was established in Norwich, and has
been a great benefit to the poor people of the city.
August 16th. France having again threatened to invade this
kingdom, a meeting of the inhabitants of the city was held at the
Guildhall, for the purpose of forming a regiment of volunteer infantry
under the regulations of the Acts for the defence of the realm, when
resolutions to that effect were adopted, and upwards of £6400
subscribed, and 1400 citizens enrolled themselves under the
command of Lieut.-Colonel Harvey. A rifle corps was also formed, of
which R. M. Bacon, Esq., then editor of the Mercury, was appointed
Captain. Both parties manifested the greatest enthusiasm, but
fortunately the services of the local warriors were not required. On
September 29th, a new telegraph was erected on the top of Norwich
Castle, to communicate with Strumpshaw Mill, Filby Church, and
Yarmouth, so as to give notice of any danger. In October, the
Norfolk and Norwich volunteer regiments agreed to perform
permanent duty at Yarmouth in case of invasion, and many of them
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